


As a Seal Upon Thine Heart

by petrodactyl352



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Season/Series 03, Psychological Trauma, Rape Recovery, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:40:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23052589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrodactyl352/pseuds/petrodactyl352
Summary: Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.Trevor and Sypha return to the castle after two long, weary months, unaware of exactly who and what awaits them when they do.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades
Comments: 123
Kudos: 954





	1. Achlys

It’s so quiet.

All he can hear is the sound of the wheels of the wagon crunching atop the gravel that covers the road, the deep, high chirp of crickets in the underbrush, and the occasional whinny of one of the horses. Besides that, it’s silent. Still. Empty almost, after so many weeks of hearing Sypha’s chipper voice in his ear and her laughter when he cracked one of his terrible jokes and her teasing and the way she would make everything better by just _talking_. 

Now she’s sitting beside him, quiet and shrunken almost, her eyes cast downward and her shoulders slumped. She’s been sitting like that for at least three days now, and she hasn’t said a word to him since they left Lindenfeld—not one single word. He’s tried to coax words from her, tried to start conversations, asked her where she wants to go next, what she wants to do, if she’s hungry, and _Sypha, please just say something, please talk to me, tell me what you’re thinking, please come back from wherever you’ve curled into yourself and back to me._

But he gets no answer, every time. 

They’re wandering aimlessly now. They’ve been attacked only once in the last three days, by three night creatures that they took care of easily enough. Still she hadn’t said anything, only nodding and looking away from him when he’d told her she’d fought well, and shaken her head when he’d asked her if she was hurt. In the night she would crawl into the back of the wagon and curl up into a ball underneath his cloak, and he would hear her quiet, soft sobs no matter how hard he tried not to. 

He’d gone to her once—only once. She had turned him away with a fierce snarl, shoving at him until he’d withdrawn. After that he’s known not to pry. 

The wagon moves over a particularly bumpy patch of road and he’s jostled from his thoughts, sitting up straight and rubbing at his eyes, realizing that he’d nearly been asleep. He can’t even remember the last time he slept—Lindenfeld, probably. In that soft bed that makes him sick when he thinks about it now. Every thought he has about that damn place makes him sick. They’d been—for a brief second in that hellhole, they’d been happy. It had been something akin to the hazy, idealistic life that always lingers in his brain, a vague and shimmering dream that’s so deeply shoved into the very back of his mind from years of loneliness and bitterness that he hadn’t even known he’d wanted it until he’d gotten a taste of it. 

A life where he and Sypha can live. That’s it. Just _live_ —live a normal, simple life where there are no night creatures and no necromancing cults and no disgusting, terrible people they thought they’d trusted. And yet something nags at him, something that insistently reminds him that there’s something—or someone—he’s forgetting. Someone who is a part of that dream, someone who he needs just as much as he needs Sypha. Someone who he’s been aching for but hasn’t even noticed it till now.

He jumps a little when Sypha stands beside him, swinging her legs onto the back of the wagon and heaving herself up and over. He watches her go, a bitter taste in his mouth. She’s not used to this life, this life of betrayal and disappointment and the sour realization that sometimes even if you give something everything it can give you nothing. That you can’t always save everyone, no matter how hard you try. He’d almost forgotten that feeling, forgotten it in the city square in Gresit in the burn of holy things in his hands and the smell of demon blood in the air and the taste of victory in his mouth, forgotten it in the crackling flame of a campfire in the middle of nowhere and the sound of two voices that chased away the nightmares. Forgotten it in the pages of his family’s history and the feeling of the Morning Star against his fingers and the legacy of the Belmonts, forgotten it in the sight of their eyes, honeyed amber and bright blue. 

He thought he’d left that part of him behind, left that life of his behind. But no matter how hard he tries nothing ever goes right. Nothing ever works. He always loses, and he always leaves with only ashes behind him to remind him of what he couldn’t do. 

He watches the moon rise, full of bitterness and thoughts of what could have been, as behind him, as she does every single night, Sypha begins to sob.

*

“I want to go back.”

He jumps violently, unprepared for the sudden sound of Sypha’s voice for the first time in five days. She sounds hoarse and her voice is cracked from disuse, but she sounds firm. He turns to look at her and she’s looking back—the first time she’s looked at him full in the face since everything had gone to pieces. Her eyes are bloodshot and tired, and her face is more hollowed, and her lips are bitten and chapped. She looks like heartbreak. 

“Go back where?” he asks, cautiously. She can’t possibly mean Lindenfeld, can she? There’s nothing there for them to even go back _to_. And surely she doesn’t want to go back to that place, not after everything that happened there. 

“The castle,” she says, still looking at him steadily. “I want to go back to the castle again.”

“You mean to see Alucard?”

Both of them inhale sharply when he says it; it’s the first time either of them has said his name aloud for… he doesn’t even remember how long. Since they’d left him, maybe. 

She swallows, then nods. “I don’t know where else to go,” she says, and her voice cracks in the middle. “I don’t know anywhere else we’ll feel safe. I just… I want to just stay somewhere for a while. With someone who we trust. Maybe it’d be best for the both of us if we lie low for a few weeks.” 

He understands what she really means. _I’m tired, and I want to rest. We had our adventures, and now there’s no hope left._

“And it’s been a while since we’ve seen him,” she goes on, in that same bleak, hollow voice. “Alucard. I wonder how he’s doing, how he’s holding up. It’s a big responsibility we left him.”

“Yeah,” he says, and he remembers the distant, tired gold of his eyes when he had told them he would make the castle his grave, how lifeless he had seemed, as if he already were a corpse. A sudden, heavy guilt settles in his chest. _Shit._

“Can we?” She looks up at him, and he’s not sure, but he thinks he can see the same guilt in her eyes, too. Maybe lying low for a while won’t just be good for the two of them. 

“Yeah,” he says again. “Yeah, let’s go back. We can just rest there for as long as we want to, and I’m sure he’ll be happy to see us. I doubt he’s had much company these past few months.”

Sypha nods, neither of them realizing exactly how wrong they are. “And it’ll be nice,” she says, “to see him again.” She worries at her lower lip, looking away from him, and he can tell she’s not telling him something. He yanks on the reins and the wagon comes to a stop, bumping gently as it does. Sypha looks up at him, startled, and he drops the reins, putting a careful hand on her shoulder, relieved when she doesn’t throw him off. “Sypha,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

She looks away again. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says hesitantly. “I just… I’ve been thinking about it—about him—a lot. Alucard,” she says by way of explanation. “And what… what he meant—means—to me and to both of us. He was a friend, yes, and an ally, but as our journey moved forward…” She swallows hard. “I don’t want to… I mean, you’re my…” She sighs. “I don’t know how to say this, Trevor. In the Hold and as we got to know him, and even afterward, I—”

“You love him,” Trevor says.

She falls silent, biting her lip. She says nothing, merely looking at him with her large, guileless blue eyes. She’s never been good at hiding things, Sypha, who comes from a culture where everything is open and nothing is a secret. It’s one of the things about her that he fell in love with in the first place. 

“I do,” she says finally. “And I love you, too.”

 _What the hell_ , he thinks dizzily, and something almost like relief crashes into him, giving birth to the sudden, powerful impulse to burst out laughing hysterically. _What the actual, bloody, fucking goddamn—_

“Oh, thank god,” he hears himself say instead. 

Her eyebrows shoot upward. “What?”

“I thought I was the only one,” he says, and now he laughs, shaking his head. “Shit, Sypha. Why didn’t you say something sooner? We could have… I don’t know, stayed with him a little longer.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. “The same reason any vampire hunter wouldn’t say anything when he realizes that he’s in love with a half-vampire, I suppose. I thought it was just… I don’t know, a spot of lust or something, but the further from the place we got the more I was sure it wasn’t.”

“I was afraid I’d lose you,” she says, looping her arms through his and laying her head on his shoulder. He smiles a little, unimaginably happy that she’s opening up again after so many days. “I didn’t want to leave you, and I still wanted to go face the world. I wanted it more than I wanted to settle. But now…”

“I get it,” he says softly, pulling her closer. “I know. Me too.”

Something almost resembling a smile tugs at her lips when she raises her head to look at him again. “Well then,” she says. “I suppose it’s time we finally returned to our dhampir, isn’t it?”

He can’t help but grin back, grabbing up the reins again. “I think so,” he says, and he can feel her smiling against his shoulder as the wagon begins to move once again down the road, neither of them knowing what exactly awaits them, nor do they know just how different things will turn out to be.

*

Someone approaches.

He can smell their blood, hear their heartbeat. No, not heartbeat—heartbeats. There are two people. ~~two people, like the last time and the time before that, it is always two people~~

He can smell their blood.

Alive, warm, happy. Three things he’s forgotten how to be. ~~three things he was with them, both of them, but which both of them he has forgotten~~

They’re coming toward him. Toward the castle. 

He does not recognize their scents. Does not recognize their heartbeats or their presences. So they’re not the villagers who have long since learned not to disturb him. It had taken twelve or thirteen impaled bodies for them to vacate the place and scurry away like rats into the underbrush, for them to learn not to come near. It doesn’t matter why they all come. He has to be alone. He can never _not_ be alone again. The lacerations on his wrists, his legs, his torso, still sting. 

~~he can still feel it, feel their hands and their breath and their lips, trailing over his body and whispering in his ear, and even though he knows it is both of them he can only see both of _them_ and hear both of _them_ and want both of _them_~~

They draw closer. Less than ten miles. 

He knows they seek him. Or rather, seek the castle. Shelter, warmth, safety. He cannot take them in. 

If he does, then he will shatter. ~~shatter the way he shattered after they left him and after he killed them~~

He can never let anyone near him ever again. If he does, they will leave him. They will betray him. They will do to him what ~~Trevor and Taka and Sypha and Sumi~~ _they_ did to him. And he will punish them for it before they can try.

So he waits, for them to come to him. He waits to kill them, to adorn his doorstep with two more bodies that keep him safe, keep him alone. ~~because being alone is being safe for him~~

They draw closer and closer still, and he waits. Perhaps they will see the forest of bodies that warns them away, and they will leave. Or perhaps they will come to him anyway. Humans can be so soft sometimes, so trusting. ~~he once trusted as easily and look where it had brought him~~

Castle Dracula.

Castle ~~Adrian~~ Alucard.

What difference does it make? He is his father’s son. He was a fool to ever think he was anything like his mother. ~~he was like her before they left him and they arrived and they tore him apart~~ But he knows he can never be like her again. Not when the scars all over his body say differently. 

They come nearer.

And he waits.


	2. Thanatos

They’re about ten miles away when they catch sight of the castle’s tallest turrets on the horizon, spearing into the burgeoning evening sky.

It’s all the more apparent against the beautiful, bizarre shades of the sunset—the stark, cold black of the stone castle against faint rose, deep azure, vivid amber and soft lilac. It makes even the macabre structure of the hulking thing, dripping Gothic turrets and bridges, look beautiful. 

Sypha is dozing, her head on his shoulder. It’s the first time he’s seen her sleep for a long, long time, and he’s grateful. It had taken them longer than he’d anticipated to make their way back towards the Belmont family home and the castle, two or three weeks almost; they had been away further—and longer—than he’d thought.

Not for the first time, he wonders how Alucard has been. 

It’s been nearing three months now, and he imagines he isn’t having the time of his life stuck in the place where he’d grown up with both his now-dead parents, and more recently, murdered his own father. Moreover the place is huge, and he’s all alone in there. Along with the Belmont Hold, also massive and totally empty. Nothing to keep him company but ghosts and shadows and dust. 

And again not for the first time—nor the last, he’s sure—he feels a pang of guilt somewhere between his ribs, almost physically painful. God, what had they been thinking, just leaving him like that? Why hadn’t they stayed with him for just a few more days? Why did they have to just up and run like that, as if their adventures and their future were more important than he was? And it isn’t as if Trevor hadn’t _thought_ about Alucard while they were away; he had. Just… not as much as he should have. And he and Sypha had almost actively avoided talking about him. 

As if they were both guilty. About leaving him alone as if he didn’t mean anything more to them than—well, just anything less than he actually did. 

_At least we’re going back now,_ he thinks. _At least there’s still time to fix this. How much could possibly have happened all the way out here in the middle of nowhere in only three months?_

“Are we there yet?” Sypha mumbles, lifting her head from where it had been lolling down his shoulder. “’S getting late, isn’t it?”

“Nearly there,” he says. “Maybe another few hours. We’ll be there by nightfall.”

“Good.” She sighs, burying her face into his chest. He puts an arm around her slight shoulders, tucking her against him, feeling the steady warmth of her seep into him. “I missed him,” she says, and it’s on an exhale of breath, and so soft he hardly hears it. “More than… more than I showed.”

“Me too,” he says quietly, leaning his head against hers. Her hair tickles his face but he doesn’t mind, he never has; he loves everything about Sypha, from her wayward strawberry curls to the freckles on her shoulders to her small, icy feet. And he has her like this, close, the way he wants. And he has her in other ways, too, closer ways. He remembers those first few times in the back of the wagon, freezing cold with nothing but a thin tarp between them and the wilderness, how clumsy it had been; all shaking fingers and harsh breaths in his ear, a tangle of sweaty limbs and the desperate tearing of clothes. 

They’d learned to get used to it, but once they’d reached Lindenfeld they could afford to actually make love on a soft bed instead of desperately fuck in the back of a wagon, which was nice, he supposes. But now there’s a fierce sort of longing inside him that wants Alucard like that too, see his perfect countenance and poise shattered, feel his long perfect curls against his fists, hear that always-soft, always-cool voice break when he says one of their names. 

He drags himself away from those thoughts, knowing it’s too soon to be entertaining those fantasies. God knows if he’s doing all right, and if he even feels the same way about him and Sypha. They haven’t even reached the damn castle and he’s already worrying himself into circles. 

“I wonder how he’s doing,” Sypha says sleepily, stifling a yawn against the back of her hand. “Whether he’s had company in the past few months.”

“Doubtful. I mean, who’d come out all the way here, to the ruins of the Belmont home and to Dracula’s fucking castle? People probably stay avoid this part of the country like the plague. They probably see it as bad luck or something.”

“Mmm… he must have been lonely, having nobody to talk to for so long,” she says, and her voice is quiet. “I wish we had gone back sooner. I wish we’d never gone to Lindenfeld in the first place—it would have made things so much simpler.” She wipes furiously at her eyes, turning her face further into his shoulder. “Maybe if we’d just stayed away from that horrible place things wouldn’t be so… so bad. So _wrong_.” She sniffles, frustratedly wiping away her tears. “I hate it,” she goes on, her voice shaking. “I hate that things went so wrong.”

“Sometimes that’s how the world works,” Trevor says, and as he says it, it all rises up behind his eyes as if it happened yesterday and not years ago; those first few years after the house had burned down, shivering with fear and infection in his eye, huddled in his father’s cloak in the woods. Praying and unable to cry for the pain he knew it would bring him. Being turned away by everyone he begged for help. Learning that sometimes people are the greatest darkness of all. 

“Sometimes that’s how you know not to be something you shouldn’t,” he says. “It’s how you learn who to be.”

“But maybe I don’t want to be… whoever this has taught me to be,” she says bitterly, sniffling again. “I wish I could take it all back somehow. Start from the beginning, before we left the castle. Stayed with Alucard, maybe even…” She hesitates, her words trailing off. She falls silent, and Trevor pretends not to have noticed the wistfulness in her voice, how sad she sounds. 

“We did what we could,” Trevor says, staring straight ahead at the road, feeling the edges of that same despair he’d felt in that small, cold stone room surrounded by bloody little shoes and wondering whether the real monster hadn’t been the one shackled to posts in the priory basement, or even the ones that had slunk out of the portal from literal hell. Maybe the real monster had been beside them all along. “We saved people, cleaned up the hinterland as much as we could have. We helped, for a little while.”

“Maybe they didn’t need saving,” she says shortly, her fingers tightening around his arm. “Maybe they deserved to die.”

“Sypha,” he says, and it comes out sharp, a bitten out plea shoved in between anger and reproach. Something in him had twisted at her words, something that brings too many familiar things to the surface. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” It’s almost a challenge, scornful and splenetic. “You’ve thought it, too. You believed it, before Gresit. You’d have watched us all die and you wouldn’t have cared.”

“Before Gresit,” he grinds out, “I was half a man, Sypha. I had nothing. I _was_ nothing. I had no reason to believe people could be worth anything, myself included. It’s because of this shit that Dracula wanted to wipe the whole world blank—you can’t have a few bad days and want to destroy the world. And you can’t meet a few bad people and want to let them all die.”

She’s silent for a little while, and he wonders whether she’s fallen asleep. Then, she says, softly—so softly he almost misses it, “I’m sorry.”

He sighs, feeling unimaginably tired for some reason. “Don’t be. It can be… hard, I know. It’s enough to make anyone lose hope. Even you.” He laces his fingers with hers, bringing their entwined hands to his lips and pressing a soft kiss to her knuckles. “But we can rest now. If only for a little while.”

“Rest sounds… nice,” she says quietly—gratefully—as far, far above, the first of the night’s stars begin to wink into the sky.

*

The horses sense it before they do.

They kick and whinny, dragging their hooves as the wagon bumps gently across the earth beside the Belmont family home, tossing their heads with clear unease. Sypha feels a frown tug at her lips as Trevor murmurs soothing nonsense to them as he does whenever they’re anxious or restless, pulling at the reins. She wonders what they sense that she and Trevor cannot, as she squints into the gathering dark.

“Let’s just get down here,” Trevor says as the horses halt completely, their whines of distress unmistakable now. “Something’s spooked them.”

“You think it’s… Alucard? He is half-vampire, after all,” she says, knowing it isn’t true even as she says it. Trevor shakes his head, leaping nimbly from the wagon and moving towards the horses, putting a gentle hand on one of their flanks. It calms somewhat, still bucking nervously, its eyes blown wide. 

“What’s wrong, boy?” he asks softly, stroking its snout, his other hand reaching back to slowly unbuckle its harnesses. “Here, let me—”

The moment the harnesses come free both the horses bolt with a sudden fright, kicking up dust into a startled Trevor’s face as they race towards the woods, leaping over the crumbling walls and vanishing from sight. He’s still holding up the leather bit, eyes wide. “What the hell?”

She has just opened her mouth to say something when she smells it. Old, cloying, choking. Heavy and iron. A familiar, nauseating stench that makes her stomach twist into knots. She whips around, staring at the castle. Night has truly fallen, and the moonlight is strong but dull, the moon hidden behind the clouds—but it’s enough for her to see a shape by the door, upright and stiff. Panic claws its way into her throat. 

“Trevor,” she breathes. “The castle. I think something’s happened to Alucard.”

He turns too, and his eyes widen. A second later both of them are running, running towards the castle doors, Sypha with her heart in her throat; something terrible has happened to him, she knows it, and oh God, why had they left, why hadn’t they stayed and helped him, why hadn’t they—

Something looms up in front of her, something tall and ghostly and something she doesn’t quite recognize the moment her eyes fall on it, something her mind cannot and will not register. She digs her heels into the ground to stop herself from crashing into it, and she looks up at it just as the moon emerges from behind the clouds. 

Sypha screams. 

It’s more a cry of horror than it is one of fear, a choked sound of pure terror that tears from her throat. She stumbles backward and away from it, her heart slamming in her chest, bile rising in her throat and numb horror spreading in her mind. 

It’s a body. 

Days old, evident from the way the blood has dried to a dark, rusty brown that flakes off in places, the way insects and animals have clearly gotten to it in the spring sun. Eyes wide open, unseeing and half-eaten away by crows. Cheeks sunken, hair matted, mouth agape—to allow for the stake that’s driven through it, holding it upright and driven into the bloody earth, suspending it above the ground. 

She scrambles backward, nearly tripping in her haste to get away from it, and she turns with shock and fear and panic mingling in her mouth only to see another impaled body behind her, and another, and another, and another. 

She spins around, eyes widening as she beholds the sight before her and Trevor—a forest, a maze of death, wooden spikes driven into the ground and bodies driven onto them in turn, eyes and mouths open, blood drying on the ground, on the wood, on their skin. The scent of death is all around her now, the scent of rot and blood and festering flesh. Her stomach heaves and she only just manages not to vomit, pressing her shaking fingers to her lips. 

Trevor is standing by the doors, a hand on the handle of his whip, face entirely closed and blank. She goes to him, unable to speak, ice spreading its cold fingers down her spine. He’s looking at the two bodies that adorn the front of the steps like ornaments, these clearly separate, apart from the others dispersed around the surrounding area. Two people, a young man and woman, brown-skinned and dark-haired, with angled eyes and segmented brows. Their bodies are clearly the oldest, probably a few weeks old. The girl’s cheek is half-eaten away, and both the boy’s eyes are gone, their blood a dark brown now. Something about them makes her hair stand on end, something subtly different about these two staked bodies that sets them apart from the others. 

“Their throats are slit,” Trevor says softly. “And they’re… barely dressed.”

“Oh, my God,” Sypha whispers, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. “Trevor, what’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and his eyes are hard, his voice even more so. “But I think it’s time we and our old friend have a nice, long chat.”

*

He bangs on the front door with the pommel of his knife.

He draws it and slams it against the door, three, four, five times, the sound of it clanging so loudly Sypha almost covers her ears. “Alucard, open the fucking door!” he bellows, anger turning his voice into a menacing growl. “Or I swear to God I’ll break this damn thing down myself!”

“Trevor, stop.” Sypha pulls him back, her heart skittering in her chest. Fear is crawling up her spine slowly, building in her chest. She can’t even remember the last time she felt fear like this, a fear so incredibly profound that it seems to block her lungs and fill her veins, making her blood run sluggish through them. Not even when she faced Dracula himself or demons from hell had she felt fear like this. “Don’t,” she goes on. “We don’t even know if—”

The doors begin to open.

She drops his arm with a gasp as they creak open slowly, deliberately, stone grinding against stone. A blast of frigid, stale air rushes towards them from inside, gusting over her bare arms and making her shiver, partly from cold and partly from unease. The yawning mouth of the gap between them seems to beckon her forward only so that it can crush her between them, the impossibly tall doors seeming like long, demented teeth that will clamp down onto her if she dares to venture between them. They push back until their edges touch the outer wall, now thrown open fully. 

Sypha glances at Trevor, her lip caught on her teeth, but he doesn’t look at her as he strides forward into the castle, his fingers visibly tightening on the Morning Star. She follows more slowly, looking around, her fear only heightening as she looks around her at the entrance hall that she, Trevor and Alucard had stormed only two months ago. It feels like a lifetime ago, a lifetime ago when she still had hope, when she still had both of them beside her. It only feels more so when she sees the place, her heart sinking; he hasn’t lifted a finger to repair the place. 

There are still long, scorching burns across the pillars, scratches on the floor and all over the walls, faint bloodstains on the carpet, which is shredded and torn. Thankfully the bodies are gone, but besides that… 

“Alucard!” Trevor calls, and he sounds—he sounds angrier than she’s ever heard him. A chill runs down her spine, and she swallows down her nausea. “Get the fuck down here and face us, you coward!”

“Trevor,” Sypha whispers. Something in her mind is whispering, telling her that there’s something very, very wrong, something she can’t explain. “Don’t…”

But he doesn’t seem to hear her. “Where are you?” he yells, striding forward, face set in a rictus snarl. “Show me your goddamn face, Alucard, or so help me I will hunt you down and I will _make_ you tell me what the fuck is going on in this place!”

He’s breathing hard. “You think we wouldn’t come back and see your—your fucking carnage? There’s a dozen innocent people out there that you fucking _murdered_ and fucking put on _sticks_ , you piece of—”

Something strikes him hard across the face. 

Her eyes register a flash of red and white, black and gold. It blurs and coalesces into a familiar figure that is still somehow alien, tall and slender and pale. Burning, hollow golden eyes fall on Trevor, who is stumbling back from the force of Alucard’s blow. There’s a small stripe of red high on his cheek, and the skin around it is already beginning to bruise. As she watches, her lips parting, a bead of blood gathers at the cut and rolls down his face like a tear. 

“Get out,” Alucard says calmly. 

There’s silence for a moment as they all look at each other—Trevor with a look of honest surprise on his face, a hand lifting to the cut on his face, Sypha with her eyes wide with shock, and Alucard impassive and cold and remote, his face set in harsh, forbidding lines and his eyes wild with rage but his body still and rigid, his voice even and sangfroid. 

A second later the spell breaks, and Trevor draws his whip, snarling. “The hell we’re getting out,” he spits. “You have ten minutes to explain what the fuck you think you’re doing before I kill you.”

“Trevor!” Sypha’s voice shatters the stillness that punctuates Trevor’s threat, her heart slamming in her chest so loudly she wonders if they can hear it. “Stop. Please.” She turns to Alucard, to his terrifyingly blank face. “Alucard,” she says. “What happened? What… what happened to you?”

He turns his head and looks at her—and the fear inside her crests in an unbreakable wave, panic rushing through her. There’s… nothing. Nothing in his face at all. No recognition, no feeling, no emotion. It’s as if she is looking into a void, a churning, hopeless void full of white noise. Something inside him has broken, something irreparable and something integral. _He’s gone,_ she thinks, blankly. _He’s gone. He’s never coming back. We’ve lost him forever._

“I said get out,” he says again, monotone. “You are not welcome here, Hunter and Scholar.”

“Yeah?” Trevor steps forward, and Sypha reaches out, wanting to call out, to tell him to stop, but no sound comes out of her mouth. “And what if we don’t give a shit? You going to stake us up beside your two friends outside the door?”

White-hot rage floods Alucard’s eyes suddenly, and his lips twist into a snarl. And then—and then he _moves_. There’s no other way to describe it; he moves, surging forward in a blur of white and gold, long fingers wrapping around Trevor’s throat and lifting him clean off his feet with every ounce of his strength. Trevor chokes and gasps, fingers freeing the Morning Star. Alucard kicks the whip away and it skids across the floor, disappearing into the shadows of the pillars that line the walls. 

He lifts Trevor up slowly, the taut muscles of his forearms flexing and contracting as he brings Trevor up to eye level. Sypha cries out, rushing forward, and as if from a distance she can hear herself begging Alucard to let him go. The edge of his sleeve slips and her breath catches when she sees a dark, livid scar encircling his wrist, half-healed and raw. He brings Trevor close, breathing hard, fangs bared and looking every inch the savage, wild creature half his blood gives him the power to be. 

“Do not dare assume you know anything that has happened here, Trevor Belmont,” he hisses, his voice a low snarl. “I owe you nothing. And if you ever question me again then I _will_ stake your ungrateful, pathetic, cowardly, _abandoning_ arse on a stick right outside this fucking place and I will do it when you are still alive so that you can die slowly. And I will watch and make Sypha watch as the life leaves you one”—he grits his teeth—“breath”—he squeezes Trevor’s throat tighter—“at a”—he brings him closer, eyes wild—“time.” He drops Trevor at his feet, who scrambles backward, gasping for breath. His fingers find his throat, and he’s looking up at Alucard’s impassive face with something almost like fear in his eyes.

Sypha turns to Alucard, and she can feel tears on her face but she doesn’t remember shedding them, doesn’t remember the last time she felt so afraid, so alone. “Alucard,” she whispers. “Please…”

His jaw tightens—and then he’s gone, vanishing in a flash of red light, warping away and folding into nothingness before her eyes. She feels her eyes overflow, fresh tears streaking down her face as she stares at the place where he had been standing only seconds before, feeling her heart tearing apart, shattering. She shoves the ache down, rushing to where Trevor is kneeling on the floor, bruises already blooming on his throat where Alucard gripped him. He’s looking at where Alucard vanished, his chest heaving up and down. 

“Trevor,” she says, and her voice cracks. “Are… are you…”

He’s still staring at the empty space where Alucard had stood, his brows drawing together, his eyes suddenly hollow and so indescribably sad that if her heart wasn’t already broken, the look on his face would have torn it in two. The look of someone who has lost too much too soon and too quickly, one thing after the other snatched from him brutally. His eyes are bright and glassy, and she thinks it might be with tears, but she cannot tell. He looks... broken.

“Sypha,” he says, softly. “What have we done?”


	3. Erebus

He watches them burn the corpses. 

He’s sitting on the roof, far, far above, but he can still see clearly. See them leave the castle, stand in front of the doors, look out over the dozen dead bodies driven into the ground. He hears them murmur, ask each other what to do, what is right. Trevor does not want the slain bodies of the innocent above his family’s legacy. Sypha does not want the people Alucard has killed to have died dishonorably. They decide to clear it all up, and it’s Trevor, to Alucard’s surprise, who suggests that they burn them all. 

“We can’t bury all these people,” he says. “As much as I want to, we can’t.”

“What about…” Sypha gazes at the two corpses closest to the doors, at ~~Sumi and Taka~~ them. “What about those two?”

Even from two hundred feet in the air Alucard sees him stiffen. “What about them?”

“Trevor,” she says, and the way she says his _name_. It makes something hot and bitter twist in his stomach, something that corrodes the already burned-away thing inside him he’d once called his heart. He’d been able to smell it on both of them the instant they had come in, that they were sleeping together. Sypha’s scent all over Trevor and Trevor’s scent all over Sypha. 

~~the same scents that had twined around him for all those weeks they’d been traveling, the scents that had imprinted themselves in his mind and on his body, the scent that had driven him mad in the Belmont Hold, curling in his brain, dizzyingly saccharine and dizzyingly _them_ , making desire and want and arousal twist hard in his stomach and made him long to embed that scent on him forever and get lost in their skin and their breath and _them_~~

“They were the first ones,” she goes on. “The first ones he…”

“Yeah,” Trevor says quietly. “I realized.”

“I don’t like it,” she says. “You said it yourself, they’re barely dressed at all. And they’re right by the doors, like a warning. As if he wants people to see them and turn away.”

“I wonder what happened,” Trevor says softly. “If they were openly hostile and that’s why he did this, then they wouldn’t be wearing his fucking nightgowns. So maybe they were his… guests, and they attacked him.”

“There’s something else,” she says. “When he… inside the castle, just now, his sleeve fell a little. There were these horrible scars on his wrists, like a cuff. I’m not sure, but I think I saw scars on his chest too, below his shirt.”

“Silver?”

“Probably. What else can hurt him that badly?”

 _You_ , Alucard thinks. The silver had been nothing compared to the pain they cause him. Sometimes he thinks they are the only thing on this earth that can hurt him so. Pain of the body he can handle—the bloody rent his father had carved into his chest a year ago, feeling his torn apart chest knitting itself back together slowly, excruciatingly; being beaten bloody by those same hands, being slammed and thrown and smashed as if he were little more than a rag doll. Feeling his bones break and heal, break and heal, break and break and heal. 

But _this_ —seeing them again after what feels like years but he knows is mere months, seeing them like this, sleeping together and happy and so clearly in a space of their own—it is torture. 

“Let’s take things one at a time,” he hears Trevor say. “Burn these poor bastards first.”

“There… there are so many,” she says softly, sadly. Almost against his will he feels a stab of remorse, choking off in his throat. ~~she’s disappointed, she thinks he’s a monster and that he deserves to die, she thinks he’s like his father, she thinks he _is_ his father and she’s right, he’s a monster and he is no worse than he was, he is disgusting~~

“Come on,” Trevor says gruffly, unbuckling his bracers and rolling his sleeves up till his elbows. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Smoke fills the sky as they get to work, both easing the stakes out of the bloody ground, easing the bodies off the stakes in turn. Trevor’s face is closed and set in harsh lines, but Sypha’s is twisted with disgust and sadness and ~~disappointment, she hates him and she’ll never forgive him~~ grief as they pile the bloody pikes in rows, stacking them up to make a gruesome, gory funeral pyre. 

They place the bodies on the makeshift pyre and Sypha turns her face away as she extends her hands, squeezing her eyes shut as fire explodes from her fingers in a concentrated beam, setting the bodies aflame. She’s shaking, Alucard can see, and Trevor puts a hand on her shoulder, burying his face in her neck. They stand like that, entwined and _together_ as they burn the bodies he killed, the people he murdered and forced through sticks just to warn others away, just so he could be alone. But they did not heed his warning. They came anyway. 

For him. 

~~no, not for him, they don’t care about him because they’re sleeping together and they’re happy and they don’t need him, they’re here because they want to rest and they want somewhere to sleep and fuck and be together and he is simply an intrusion, a barrier that stands in their way, a monster whose messes they must clean~~

“We’ll fix this,” he hears Trevor say quietly, and over the crackle of the flames and the cracking of burning wood he thinks he hears Sypha sob. “I swear to God, Sypha, I’m not leaving this fucking place until we fix what we did.”

_What we did?_

“And if we do ever leave,” he says, and his voice is getting stronger, resolve and something almost like anger in his voice—anger not at Alucard but at _himself_ , he realizes—hardening the words, “we’re taking that sad bastard with us. Staying here is killing him. We can put up—I don’t know, fucking barriers or something, there’s bound to be something in that library. But from now on, wherever we go, we go together.”

He hears her sob again, and she turns her face into his chest, the fire from her hands slowing to a spark, then stopping entirely as she lifts them, fingers bunching in his tunic as she presses herself to him, her shoulders shaking. “He… he looked at me, just for a moment,” she says in between gasping breaths, and Alucard can see the silvery tracks the tears make down her face, limned by the light of the rising dawn. “There was nothing, Trevor. Nothing in his face at all. He looked so _empty_. It—it didn’t look like him at all, I think he’s…”

“He’s not gone.” Trevor’s voice is firm, brooking no room for doubt. “He’s not. We’ll get him back, I swear. I swear, Sypha. He’s still in there somewhere, I know it. And we’re not leaving without him.” His own arms come around her fully and then they’re locked in each other’s embrace, Trevor pressing his cheek to her hair and shutting his eyes and Sypha’s arms pulling him closer as she weeps. 

She… she is weeping for _him_.

~~they came back for him~~

He lets himself think, just for a moment, what would happen if he went down to them, let them take him in their arms, hold him. ~~has he not dreamed of it before, how it would feel between them, his hardness and her softness, his warmth and her coolness, both their voices in his ear and that safety only they had been able to give him~~ Let them kiss him, let Sypha take his face in her slender hands and press her Cupid’s bow lips to his, let Trevor’s own lips follow, taste her, him, _them_ on his tongue—

And suddenly he is flat on his back on the silk sheets of his bed again, lips parting in shock and surprise as they lean over him, brown scarred skin made creamy and soft by the moonlight, identical little smiles on their faces and their hands on his chest. ~~Sumi~~ _She_ leans down first, fingers curving around his face as she kisses him, and a soft explosion goes off in his head, a sudden, soft _Oh_ all he can think. She tastes like wine and mint, and something in his mind is whispering that he does not want her like this, does not want him like this. Friends, perhaps. Students. Allies. Not… lovers.

But then she is letting him go and another hand comes to rest on his cheek, turning his face, and then he sees ~~Taka~~ _him_ leaning down, and it rears suddenly in his chest, the need to be wanted, desired, to be _loved_. ~~Trevor and Sypha~~ They could not give it to him, but ~~Taka and Sumi~~ _they_ can. And the whisper in his mind vanishes as he leans up, fingers digging into his shoulders as he leans up to meet his lips with his own. His eyes drift closed, and if he squeezes them shut tightly enough then he can almost imagine the soft, chapped lips that caress his own do not belong to the boy above him but another, another who he truly does want like this—

He cringes away from the memories, the scars that crisscross his whole body throbbing as he jerks back. Nausea rises in his throat and he presses a hand to his lips, his breathing turning shallow. He scrambles up off the ledge he was perched on, stumbling backwards and away from the burning bodies, away from Trevor and Sypha entwined on the grass, away from his mistakes and his _shame_. 

He turns, blind panic and grief and humiliation making tears rise in a hot flood to his eyes, and flees.

*

The two graves aren’t deep, and they’re hardly proportional, but they’ll have to do. They’re a little ways away from the doors, off to the side near the woods, away from prying eyes.

Something had stopped him from burning these two bodies, something that had nagged at him constantly. He doesn’t have enough information to piece together what had happened to lead to these two poor sods on sticks outside Alucard’s door, but theories and stories keep bouncing around in his head, each more terrible than the last. 

He tries not to gag as he pulls the pikes from their decaying remains, squeezing his eyes shut as he hears the squelch of wood dragging through dead flesh and gritting his teeth to stop his dinner from making a reappearance as he feels the stake pull through their dead bodies. He had seen how uncomfortable Sypha had been, how ill she had looked, and had volunteered to bury the two himself. She had only nodded and turned away, walking towards the Belmont Hold without a backwards glance. 

He places the bloodied pikes aside, gently scooping up the girl’s body first. Even though her face is half-eaten away and rotting he can tell that she had been young—too young—when she had died. She looks maybe Sypha’s age, with unmarked brown skin and thick dark hair. From the East, maybe. Over the Black Sea and the empires of kings and generals. He knows Alucard would not have killed her or her companion without reason. And again he wonders what she did, what could possibly have happened for it to end like this. 

He lowers the boy into his grave besides his partner next, straightening and shoveling dirt over their bodies to cover their remains. It’s methodical, monotonous labor, each stab of the shovel and each lift of it out of the earth making his arms burn. His palms start to blister and he doesn’t know whether they slip on the shovel’s handle because of sweat or blood, but he doesn’t stop to look. 

Finally he shovels the last of the dirt back into the graves, leaning up and loosing a breath. The sun is high in the sky now, and it beats down on him, making sweat roll down his back and into his eyes. He lifts a hand to wipe his forehead, and glances down at his palm. Blood, then, that had made his fingers slip and slide over the shovel. He throws it aside, his bloody handprints stark against the light wood as it rolls away. He can’t even bring himself to feel the pain of it. Just as he can’t bring himself to feel the bruises on his neck throb with each breath he takes. He deserves it. 

He moves away towards the Belmont Hold where he had seen Sypha vanish, glancing back at the castle as he does. The doors are open, and for a second he thinks he sees a ghostly, pale figure standing at the top of the stairs far, far inside, gazing coldly at him. He blinks and it’s gone, and he’s left to wonder if he’d imagined it. He turns away again, a sour taste in his mouth. When had everything gone so horribly wrong? When had everything turned inside out and spat them out again, a sting in the tail of the things they wanted, so that they regretted ever wanting it in the first place? What had he even expected—for Alucard to be waiting for them when they arrived, smiling that small, rare smile of his, for him to hold out his arms and welcome them home, for him to tell them he had missed them so and that he loved them too…?

He pulls himself from the thoughts with a jerk, curling his fingers into fists. His nails cut into the bloody sores on his palm and the pain clears his head somewhat, bringing him back to reality. He can’t afford to dwell on what could have been. He’d been a fool just to think that things would fall so easily and readily into place. 

He finds Sypha standing in front of what had once been a ragged, gaping hole in the ground leading to the Belmont Hold—but now is a clean, paneled underground vault of sorts, with a wooden shaft and an elevator attached to a weight hovering in front of them. She’s gazing at it silently, her eyes red-rimmed and her face hollow with despair. When she speaks her voice trembles, thick with unshed tears.

“He’s rebuilding this whole place,” she says. “He’s nearly fixed it all up—I went down there. There’s torches down there, the ones that light by themselves, like the ones we saw under Gresit. The broken shelves are repaired, and all the books are organized. And there’s a scaffolding around the manor. I think he’s… I think he’s rebuilding the house.”

His heart thuds heavily in his chest. “What?”

“Look.” She turns, pointing, and he does—and his breath catches in his throat. She’s right; there’s definitely a scaffolding around the most wrecked bits of the manor, and there’s a knee-high fence around the place that definitely hadn’t been there before. The cracked fountain has been polished, the weeds plucked, the bushes pruned, the doors rebuilt. It looks… almost new. Like a manor being built rather than rebuilt. Like somewhere he could go back to, somewhere he can carry on his family’s legacy. Start a family, maybe. Continue the Belmont line. 

“And he hasn’t done a thing to repair the castle,” Sypha goes on. “It’s in shambles. He hasn’t lifted a finger to fix anything in there, but he’s nearly finished rebuilding your whole house and he’s fixed up your whole library.”

“Shit.” He presses his hands to his eyes, trying to quell the hot prick of tears that threaten to rise. Guilt like a vise wraps around his windpipe, making it hard to breathe. It snakes its bitter tendrils into his chest and between his ribs, curling up in his stomach, its blistering venom coursing through his veins. “Why did we leave him here, Sypha?”

He feels her wrap her arms around him from behind, resting her head between his shoulder blades. Her right hand is splayed over his heart, and he wonders if she can feel its rhythm against her fingers, the same way he can feel hers through his back. It’s nearly enough to make the last of his defenses crumble, threatening to send him to his knees, which are suddenly not strong enough to support him. He bites his lip hard, to try and rein in the wayward emotion, all the despair and grief and guilt that’s eating away at him inside. 

“Let’s find him,” she says, and her voice vibrates through his back, calming him a little. “We’ll find him, and we’ll talk. And this time leave that last bit to me.”

He chokes on what could be a laugh, lowering his hands from his face and ignoring the way they come away wet, salt stinging the blisters on his palms. He looks up at the spring sky, the same color as Sypha’s robes, a bright, iridescent blue. It’s beautiful outside—too beautiful. It shouldn’t be. Everything has gone so, so wrong so, so suddenly. Alucard is slipping away from them, and reality is slipping away from them too. It should be gray and cold. Nothing should be beautiful.

“Come,” she says, an arm wrapping around his shoulders as she presses a soft kiss to his temple. “Let’s go inside.”

*

They find the kitchen easily enough—it’s a little room off the main hall, with wide windows and wood-paneled walls and sunlight streaming into it. There’s a decently sized dining table in the middle of it, and it’s relatively cleaner than the other parts of the castle they’d stumbled upon in their search.

Trevor moves towards the windows as Sypha heads to the counter, washed dishes stacked neatly and silver cutlery arranged perfectly. She can’t imagine Alucard cooking in here, leaning against the counter as water boils on the stove, using the knives on the counter to carefully chop vegetables, preparing himself a meal before sitting at the table all alone with no one to share it with. Eating by himself. Washing the dishes afterward. Keeping his leftovers in the pantry. Doing it all over again the next day. 

She sighs, trailing a finger over the wood of the counter as she moves along. She glances at the shelf nearby, one with dusty bottles of wine sitting atop them. She moves forward towards the shelf and stops dead, her brows drawing together as she beholds what sits beside the bottles. She leans closer to get a better look, her lips parting. _Oh, God, no._

“Trevor,” she hears herself call. “Come here.”

“Yeah?” He sidles over and she moves aside, tears pricking at her lashes again as she does. “Look,” she says, and her voice is a strangled whisper. “Look what he—” She exhales shakily, wiping at her eyes. “He made _dolls_ of us, Trevor. And we didn’t even—we didn’t even say his name out loud—” 

“Fuck,” he mutters, reaching out and gently picking up the little Trevor doll, with spoons for arms and ladles for feet. It even has a little twine whip sewn onto its hip, onto the threadbare little tunic he’s dressed it in. He turns it over carefully in his big hands, looking down at it with a strange sort of softness in his eyes. It even has his hair, shaggy and unkempt, and the buttons he’s used for its eyes are blue, with a red thread scar across the left one. 

The Sypha doll is much the same, swaddled in tiny little Speaker robes, with her strawberry curls and blue button eyes gazing out at her balefully. _At least we were here with him,_ they seem to be saying. _Where were you?_

She imagines him sitting at a desk, carefully sewing the little dolls together, picking the precise shade of blue for the button eyes, carefully stitching the little robes together, remembering the way the sash was draped and remembering the harnesses that hold Trevor’s throwing knives crisscrossing his chest. Placing them on his kitchen counter (with little Trevor beside the bottles, she notices with a little huff of amusement) so that they watch him while he eats. How much care and affection must have gone into the whole thing. How he remembered them while he made them. How much he probably missed them. 

She reaches out to hold her little doll counterpart, feeling the lumpy sack of it in her hands. She stares down at it, at its little spoon arms and ladle feet, and as she gazes down at it a tear splashes onto its little button eye. 

“Every time I think I’ve felt shitty enough for leaving him here,” Trevor says, looking down at his own doll self, “we find something that makes it worse.”

Sypha wipes at her eyes furiously, stuffing the Sypha doll back onto the shelf forcefully. She turns away, sniffling, hating herself and hating everything that’s happened. She takes a deep, shaky breath, fingers gripping the edge of the dining table so tightly her knuckles blanch. She feels all the grief, all the anger and all the guilt harden in her chest, and she clenches her jaw. They have to fix this. They _will_ fix this. She’ll burn this whole damn place to the ground before she lets anything else happen to him. 

“Trevor,” she says shortly, and her voice is hard, firm. She clenches her hands into fists, swallowing hard. “Let’s go. We’re going to find him, and we’re going to fix this—we have to try.”

“He probably doesn’t want to look at our faces, Sypha,” he says, placing Doll Trevor next to Doll Sypha on the shelf and moving to stand next to her at the table. “Not after what we did. If I were him I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s hurting.” Her voice jumps and she forces the sadness, the guilt, the _pain_ , down. “A lot. We need to find out what happened here, what those two did. Then we can try to… to help him through it. He’s been so alone…”

“Where would we even look for him? Where do we even start?” He frowns down at her, drying blood smeared across his face and his bracers stuffed in his pockets, sleeves rolled up. His hair is a mess, and the bruises on his throat are stark and livid against his skin. He looks lost almost, as if he has next to no sense of who he is anymore. The last time she had seen him look this lost was when she had first met him, in Gresit. 

_Before Gresit,_ she remembers him saying, _I was half a man, Sypha. I had nothing. I_ was _nothing._

She takes a deep breath. “We’ll search every room if we have to. But…” She bites her lip, remembering the broken, grief-stricken look on Alucard’s face in that little room, with the stripped bed behind him and the small desk in the corner, maps and drawings on the walls and constellations painted on the ceiling. Stuffed dolls and toys in the corner, a family portrait on the wall. The realization slams into her suddenly, so suddenly it seems to hit her almost physically somewhere in her chest. _That had been his bedroom when he was a child. He killed his father in his own childhood bedroom._

“I think…” She grabs Trevor’s bloody hand, pulling him behind her as she leaves the kitchen, moving blindly through the corridor beyond. “I think I know where he is.”


	4. Tartarus

“Wait,” Trevor says. 

He tugs on Sypha’s hand where she’s pulling him along behind her, marching purposefully through the castle, through snaking corridors and a dizzying arrangement of halls and doors. It hadn’t dawned on him back when they’d stormed the place in their fight against Dracula and his forces exactly how massive the castle is, but now he’s slowly beginning to realize that it truly is immense, like a maze of corridors and passageways, hidden doors and tapestries and staircases curled in tight spirals leading into towers and turrets. 

She turns, lips tilting down in a familiar frown. He tugs on her hand again, drawing up to a door to their left on the corridor she’s leading him down—she seems to know exactly where she is going, though she hadn’t told him that before she’d started dragging him along behind her as if her life depended on it. The door is slightly ajar, and a slice of light spills into the hallway, a bright stripe of gold on the dark wood floor. 

“Something feels… off,” he says, and he doesn’t quite know what it is, though something in his mind is whispering to him that something does indeed seem very, very wrong. “What’s in here?” he asks, fingers reaching out to come to rest on the door. It’s smooth and cool against his fingertips, and it gives way ever so slightly beneath the pressure. It creaks as it does, the bar of sunlight that the gap lets out widening. 

“I don’t know,” she says, still frowning. “But he’s not in there, Trevor. And we don’t know what is. It’s not our place to look. Come on.”

“No, wait.” Something is drawing him towards the room, something powerful and sinister almost, something nagging at his senses. It’s almost as if something is pricking at him underneath his skin, some bone-deep unease that sets his whole body on edge. “There’s something in there. Something we need to see.”

 _“Trevor,”_ she hisses as he steps forward, his hand falling out of hers as he slowly pushes the door open. And just as he does he realizes exactly what it is about this room that is making him so uneasy about what lies beyond. 

It’s the smell of blood. 

The unease coiled in his gut heightens as his mind registers it—the scent of old blood and death, blanketing the whole room, clinging to the walls and the floor and the bed. He steps into the room, already dreading what he will see, and looks around, fingers freeing the door behind him. It’s a pretty plain room, with a desk in one corner and a smaller door off to the side, presumably leading to the bathroom. It’s moderately sized, and the floor is paneled hardwood.

There’s a massive bed towards the far wall, bracketed by tall arching windows covered with gauzy curtains. Bright sunlight spears through the glass, stabbing downwards in harsh golden rays onto the bed—clearly illuminating the wide, rusty bloodstains on the mattress and curtains, spatters of it stretching across the bedposts and stray droplets clinging to the pillows and sheets below. 

And then the bedroom dissolves before his eyes, and suddenly he isn’t there anymore. He’s unlocking the covered door in the Judge’s house, pushing it open. He’s stepping inside, eyes adjusting to the shadows that veil the little room he’s walked into. He can barely make out shelves jutting out all over the walls, and small objects placed on them. And then Sypha is conjuring a flame and holding it up and suddenly the room is flooded with light. 

_He was the Judge,_ Trevor had said. _And he found his little pleasures._

Bloody little shoes, stains across the cloths they’ve been placed on. Pair upon pair upon pair, stacked all over the room, countless trophies of the Judge’s sick authority. So small. So young. So many. He had been a murderer, taking perverse pleasure in enacting his power. In keeping order. And he had been a friend. A decent person, maybe the most decent person Trevor had met in a while. Efficient to the point of ruthlessness, he had thought. But he had never imagined this. And to think that they had… they had _trusted_ this—this _monster_ —

Sypha gasps when she comes into the room behind him, and suddenly he’s yanked back to the present. She’s staring at the bed, at the blood that covers it, the splatters across the curtains high above and the two congealed pools of it at the foot of the bed, soaked entirely into the mattress and dried to a dark brown. It looks weeks old. All the blood in the room looks weeks old, and the smell of it—rot and death and God, so much _blood_ —is enough to make nausea rise in the back of his throat. 

“It’s… it’s his room,” Sypha says, and he turns to look at her. She’s standing by the desk, looking down at the papers that are strewn across it. “These are his things.”

He turns back to the bed, staring at the bloody mattress and stained curtains, and as he stares and stares and stares he wonders if what he is thinking is the worst theory he’s had yet. Blood on the bed, _his_ bed, two thick dark pools of it at the edge, scars on his wrists and two impaled bodies scantily clad in only loose nightgowns—Alucard’s nightgowns—speared outside his door. It’s almost perfect how everything slots together. 

“This is where he killed them,” Trevor hears himself say. “His… his bedroom. On his bed.”

“Trevor,” Sypha says, her voice a near-whisper. “You don’t think… you don’t think they—”

“I don’t know what they did, Sypha,” he says, still staring numbly at the bloodstained bed. “We can’t jump to conclusions before we really know what happened. The only way to find out for sure is to hear it from Alucard himself.”

He knows—somewhere, he thinks he knows what happened. But he doesn’t want to. He wants it not to be true, and the only way he can manage that is if he ignores the glaring, unmistakable evidence of the contrary spread out right in front of him. Because it can’t be true. He won’t let it be true. Because if it is true then he doesn’t know if they can ever pull Alucard back from wherever he’s gone because of it. If it is true, then Alucard might just be gone forever. 

“Come on,” he says, backing away from the bloody bedroom, the way the bed seems to be smiling a long, demented smile at him, the two bloody eyes at the end and the long curved splatters across the front, on the curtains. “Let’s get out of here.”

She doesn’t protest as he takes her hand again, pulling her out of the room. The door swings shut behind them and unbidden in his mind rises the image of two people, brown-skinned and angle-eyed and dark-haired pushing this very door open and closing it behind them and never coming out again, approaching the bed where a familiar figure sleeps, golden hair fanned out onto the pillows and skin illuminated like alabaster in the moonlight. Eyes like floating suns opening, lashes as long and slender as spider’s legs feathering over cliff-high cheekbones. Soft, full lips parting over slender, needle-thin fangs. Livid scars on pale, elegant wrists and spatters of blood on the mattress. 

He will not think about how they might have gotten there. 

“This way,” Sypha murmurs, fingers squeezing his arm lightly. He realizes he’s just been staring at the door without moving, a twisted, marred version of what might have happened playing itself over and over in his head. He remembers leaving Lindenfeld, bitter and angry and hopeless all over again, the way he had been before Gresit—before _them_. Before Sypha and Alucard. How unfortunate he’d thought their plight had been. How disillusioning. How they hadn’t deserved it after everything they’d done to help. 

And while he’d been feeling sorry for himself and wondering why death and blood and unhappiness seemed to follow at his heels like a loyal hound, Alucard had been—he had been—

“Where are you going?” he asks, as Sypha resumes her pulling of his hand and her leading him through the castle. “Where do you think he’ll be?”

“Do you remember where we killed Dracula?” she says, slightly out of breath from the steps they had just climbed. “That little room we found them in?”

“Yeah,” he says, brows drawing together. “I mean, it must be important to him since that’s where it all ended, but I don’t get why he’d be—”

“Think, Trevor,” she says. “Remember. There was a small bed, stars painted on the ceiling. Maps and children’s drawings on the walls, a family portrait. Dolls and stuffed toys and a desk. Somehow over the course of their fight they both ended up in his—”

“His bedroom when he was little,” Trevor realizes. “Where he stayed when he was a child.”

“And that’s where he grew up with his father,” she says, not looking at him. “Where he lived out his childhood. And he had to kill him there, the man he loved and trusted as a child, in that same place. It must have been—it must have been so horrible for him to do that. And he never said anything, never let us know how much he must have been suffering.”

“Christ.” He exhales, wanting to tear the whole fucking place apart suddenly, this whole castle that is a massive reminder of everything Alucard has lost, a relic of every single thing life has cruelly torn from him, crushed every good thing about his life and turned it all bitter and hurtful. And he has to stay here, has to live out the rest of his immortal life here, the place where he’d grown up with his parents, came to after he watched his mother die, got torn open by his father, returned and slain him, stayed alone afterward when Sypha and Trevor had so easily left him without a second thought—and now the place where two people had… had hurt him even more, twisting the knife already buried deep into his heart. 

“I think he’ll be in there,” Sypha goes on, and even in the dimness of the corridor he can see her eyes shining with unshed tears, though her voice is steady. “I don’t know why, but I think he will be.”

He’s just about to open his mouth to answer her when they turn a corner onto another long corridor, this one vaguely familiar. The carpet beneath their feet is charred in places and ripped up, the walls sporting flowery cracks in their stone surfaces. The floor is crumbled apart in places along the sides, and there’s bloodstains dried to black smears on the carpet. A door along the middle of the corridor is slightly ajar.

“Isn’t this where we fought Dracula?” Trevor asks, looking at the corridor stretching out in front of him but not really seeing it—instead he sees Sypha being flung high and far, her arm ripped in bloody ribbons by Dracula’s claws, sees Alucard drive his sword through his father’s arm as he chokes the life out of Trevor, sees the king of vampires with eyes red as blood and a face that is disturbingly familiar, sees Alucard drive forward into his magic until it implodes, crashing through the wall behind them. His sword clattering to the ground. A ragged hole in the wall half-melted by pure magical heat. Trevor and Sypha alone in the corridor, left to follow before it’s too late. But they still had been, no matter how fast they had run. Just as they were too late this time. 

“Yes,” she says softly, her fingers tightening on his. “That means this is—was—his study.” She gently pushes the door open, her eyes still swimming. They don’t go in, merely looking into the room. It looks no different, just as much of the castle does; shards of broken glass scattered all over the floor, the hearth destroyed, the floor cracked. Only Dracula’s chair is upright, standing in the middle of the room, incongruously so in contrast to the rest of the destruction. He isn’t sure, but he thinks he sees scratches on the chair’s arms, and blood on the seat. 

She tugs on his hand again and they move on, drawing up in front of the hole in the wall. He really hasn’t done anything to repair the place, Trevor thinks, feeling a pang of unease. It is as if he hadn’t really cared about taking care of it, and had simply let it fall into disuse—just as he had done for his own mind, his own soul. 

The melted, burned edges of the hole have solidified and cooled over the weeks, and it’s almost like a corridor of its own now, snaking through the castle between the walls. They walk forward into it, following its path through the wall. They emerge in the library, where books are scattered everywhere and shards of glass are strewn across the marble floor. Shelves are overturned and cracked and broken, and the apparatus that had probably once sat on the table that line the walls are lying broken on the floor. 

They say nothing, simply moving through the ruins. They follow the destruction, the evidence of the fight that had taken father and son through the castle—broken doors, cracked walls, bloodstains. Slowly they make their way through the castle towards where Sypha seems to be so sure Alucard will be. They step over cracked floors and shattered glass, and with each step he takes Trevor realizes exactly how terrible that fight must have been, how hurt Alucard must have been. There had been so much he hadn’t understood, hadn’t realized.

“Here,” Sypha whispers as they step into another familiar corridor. He remembers running down it, fingers finding the hilt of his sword, panic rising in his throat at how quiet it had been and wondering whether they were too late after all, and if Alucard was dead and they would be dead too—but then they’d turned into the little room and he’d seen the ghostly, decaying remains of Dracula reaching out for his only son, mouth agape and skin melting, as if to embrace him one last time—

He pushes the door open.

The first thing he sees is the ring. 

A spark of silver, the only bright thing in the room. Lying on the floor, among the charred carpet and ashes that is all that remains of Dracula. Still there, on the floor. Alucard probably hadn’t wanted to touch it. There’s a bloodstained bedsheet crumpled on the floor beside it, creased and stiff with the stuff. It looks as old as the blood in Alucard’s bedroom, dried to a dark, dark brown.

The next thing he sees is Alucard.

He’s kneeling beside the charred carpet, shoulders slumped, long hair shrouding his face, his back to them. He isn’t moving, sitting rigid and still on the ground. Sypha drops Trevor’s hand, stepping forward tentatively and swallowing hard. 

“Alucard?” she asks softly. 

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

She steels herself visibly, shutting her eyes a moment and exhaling, fingers closing into fists before she relaxes. Then she moves forward decisively, stepping over the stained sheet and the charred floor and kneeling beside Alucard on the floor, looking into his face. He turns his head to look back at her, his hair falling artfully over the curve of his shoulder. Even now, like this, Trevor can’t help but think that he’s beautiful, the most beautiful man he’s ever seen. 

“Why did you come?” he asks, his voice quiet. He sounds hollow, bleak. Hopeless, almost. “Why did you come back? Why now?”

“We wanted to see you,” Sypha says simply. “We missed you, Alucard.”

He chokes on a bitter laugh, turning away again to stare at the ring on the floor in front of him. He says nothing, and Trevor takes it as his cue to move forward as well, kneeling on Alucard’s other side, finally able to see his face. He looks thinner, gaunt almost, and his eyes are lifeless and sad, duller and tired. They flick upward to rest on Trevor beside him, then almost immediately drop to his throat, where the bruises his fingers had pressed into the skin are still dark and clearly visible. A numb sort of horror spreads across his face, as if only now he is remembering that it was him who had put them there. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

“Me, too,” is all Trevor says in reply.

Alucard reaches out almost hesitantly, slender fingers shaking as they brush against the bruises, feather-light and just as soft. He draws his hand back immediately after, as if worried Trevor’s skin will burn his fingers. He clutches his hand to his chest, shrinking away from them as he turns away again, shaking his head. “You must think I’m a monster,” he says, his voice almost disturbingly even and calm. “That I am my father reincarnate. Is that why you returned? To slay me as I slayed him?”

“No, of course not,” Sypha says, clearly unable to hide the shaking in her voice. “It’s as I said—we missed you, we wanted to see you again.”

“Did you?” He scoffs a little, still not looking at them. “Well, now you’ve seen me. You can be on your way. Leave. Leave like you left me here the last time. I imagine it gets easier to do so with time.”

“We’re staying.” Trevor’s voice is short. “We’re staying here, Alucard. We’re not leaving.”

“What brought about this sudden change in heart?” He turns to glare at Trevor, and he’s still curled up on the floor on his knees but his voice is sharper than the crack of Trevor’s whips, full of bitterness and anger. And why shouldn’t he be? After he had taken in those two people Trevor had buried and they had—

“You,” he says. 

Alucard’s face goes slack for just a moment, lips parting and eyebrows drawing together. A second later the spell breaks and his lips twist once again into a bitter line. “You do not need me,” he says. “You didn’t need me before, why would you need me now?”

“We did need you before,” Sypha says. “We just didn’t realize it then. But we know now, Alucard. We want to help you, want to be here with you. Please understand. We—” She swallows hard, and Trevor knows it’s too soon to say those words. She seems to realize the same thing, tucking them away for later. “You are more important to us than you think,” she says instead. 

“What happened?” Trevor asks, keeping his voice low. “What happened while we were gone, Alucard? Those people outside, who were they? What did they do?”

“They taught me a valuable lesson,” Alucard says, his voice tight. “One I should have learned long ago.” He crumples further into himself, glaring at the floor. “They crossed me, betrayed me, and they paid the price.”

“Alucard—”

“It is no business of yours,” he snaps. “I put them where they belonged, as a warning. You should have heeded it. Stayed away from me like you had all these months. It would have done all three of us a great deal of good.”

“Yes,” Trevor says, losing patience, “because you’re doing great, aren’t you? Holed up in here all alone with nothing and nobody to help you? Rotting in here with just your memories and ghosts?”

“I would have preferred that to you returning,” he says stiffly. 

Hurt flashes across Sypha’s face, and she draws back suddenly. Alucard seems to sense it; he stiffens slightly, and something almost like guilt blooms in his eyes before he hardens again, looking away from her. “My father lived a solitary life,” he says, coldly. “Perhaps it is time I realized I am destined to do the same.”

“But he didn’t,” Trevor says. “There was your mother.”

Alucard flinches visibly at the words. “She didn’t stay forever,” he says. “Nobody does. Everyone leaves—mortality is a fickle thing, Belmont. You of all people should know that.”

“What did they do to you, Alucard?” he asks, looking him directly in the face. “What did they do to you to make you like this?”

“They showed me the truth,” Alucard hisses, baring his teeth. “They showed me that my father was right. Humans—they’re poison. No matter what you do for them they will always be selfish. No matter how tenderly you feed them they will always bite at your fingers. They’re ungrateful, hateful, cowardly. Closing these doors and barring it with a warning is the only way I could be—” The words seem to choke off in his throat. “Be _safe,”_ he finishes, curling in on himself further. 

“Alucard,” he says again, forcing his voice to even out, forcing himself to sound firm and calm. “What did they do?”

His jaw clenches. “Taka and Sumi,” he says, and there’s venom in his voice, his teeth gritted. “They came here, asking for my help,” he grinds out between clenched teeth. “Hunters, vampire hunters. From Japan. Human slaves of one of my father’s generals. They escaped once she came here, and they followed, so that they could kill her and free themselves. But after they learned I was here they came to me to learn. To equip themselves so that they could take their knowledge and weapons back to their people and defend themselves.” He takes in a shuddering breath. “I took them in. Trained them. Helped them. They _stayed_. Here, with me. We grew closer over the days they stayed here, but just as I had been before, I was blind. Blinded by their being there, staying the emptiness.”

He’s shaking now, fine tremors wracking his whole body. “I should have seen it,” he whispers. “Should have seen that all they wanted was the castle, to move it, to take it back to their country. Should have seen that they had been destroyed beyond repair in all their years as slaves, watching their own die day upon day. I just—” He sighs, all the fight going out of him. He slumps, shaking his head. “I just wanted them to stay.”

“Alucard…” Sypha’s fingers hover over his shoulder and when he says nothing she cautiously lays her hand on his arm, squeezing gently. He’s still not looking at them. “I thought I could—since you two were—that they might be what you—” He jerks back suddenly, away from Sypha’s hand on his shoulder. She withdraws quickly, eyes wide and sad as she slowly moves away. “I was wrong,” he says shortly. “They betrayed me. I killed them, in self-defense. It was that or get killed myself. It was after that I realized perhaps I am destined to be alone after all.”

“You’re not,” Sypha says softly. “Alucard, we want you to come with us. Please.”

“Come with you?” He scoffs, and it’s a bitter, hurtful sound. “You think I wouldn’t realize that you two are fucking? That you’ve likely been together since a few days after you left me here? I can smell it all over both of you—you’re happy together. I would only be an obstruction. In the way. A nuisance. I have no desire to be between you and your happiness.” He stands abruptly, looking down at them with a cold look on his face. 

“Now you know what they did,” he says shortly. “You know what happened. Leave now.”

“It isn’t like that,” Sypha says, her eyes filling again. “Alucard, we—we want you with us, we—”

“That’s not all they did,” Trevor interrupts, looking up at Alucard, heart racing. “The way you’re holding yourself, the way you’re moving. You’re hurt. Sypha said she saw scars on your wrists. That’s not all, is it? From the way you’re treading, it seems like there are… burns, or cuts, all over you. Chest, arms, legs. Silver, since nothing else can cause you injury like that. Your bedroom, we saw it. The door was open. There’s blood all over your bed and your curtains. Those two—Taka and Sumi, you said—they were hardly dressed. How did they betray you? What did they do to you?”

Alucard is entirely still, hardly breathing. He looks—scared. Scared, and lost. His lips tremble, his throat moving as he swallows. “They… you—” He’s breathing heavily. “I can’t,” he gasps, shaking his head. “Please—”

“Alucard.” Sypha stands, taking a step towards him. “You needn’t tell us if you don’t wish to—but this is killing you. If you tell us what happened, then we can help you. We want to help you.”

“No, you don’t,” he says, blankly. “You don’t want to help me, you came here to rest and be happy together and I’m—I’m such a—I’m so fucked up and you have to deal with all of this—and you had to burn the bodies and I didn’t, I couldn’t—all I do is burden you and hurt you and stop you, I can’t let your bear the brunt of my mistakes—”

Sypha shakes her head, eyes wide. “No,” she says. “No, that isn’t what it is, Alucard. We—”

“I can’t,” he says, holding out a hand as she moves forward, arms out to reach for him. “I’m—I can’t. Not yet. Please.” He looks at them both, Sypha standing with her arms outstretched and Trevor still crouched on the floor, and his face fills with such pain that Trevor feels something inside him twist. 

“I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely, turning away. He leaves the room, the door slamming behind him so hard the bolts rattle. A tear slides down Sypha’s cheek and she stares blankly at the door, looking lost and helpless. “We have to follow him,” she says, moving towards the door. “We have to—”

“No,” Trevor says, standing and pulling her back, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her against him. “No, not now. Not yet, Sypha—”

“Let me go!” she yells, thrashing and kicking, and he only holds her tighter. She lets out an impressive torrent of profanity, elbows jamming into his stomach and heels kicking into his thighs. Still he doesn’t let her go, pulling her tighter against him. “Sypha, stop,” he says into her ear. “We have to give him space. We have to let him go, figure this out on his own for a few hours—”

She screams, a horrible, drawn-out sound of grief and anger and guilt and sadness. Her fists slam into his hands and then she goes entirely limp, dragging him down with her until they’re both crouched on the floor, Trevor’s arms around her as she drags in ragged breaths. He buries his face into her hair, breathing her in and silently willing her to calm. 

“He didn’t shut us out this time,” he says. “He talked. We have almost everything. He just needs to—he just needs some time. I’m sure he’ll come back.”

“He doesn’t even want us here,” she whispers. “He doesn’t want us to help.”

“He does.” He holds her tighter. “He does, Sypha.”

“Then why?” Her voice cracks. “Trevor, we both know what they did to him. We both know that silver couldn’t burn him as badly through his clothes. It’s—they—”

“Don’t.” His fingers clench on her robes. “Not until he tells us himself.”

“I’m glad he killed them,” she whispers. “Because if he hadn’t then I would have made putting them on pikes look like a mercy.”

“I know,” he says, tucking her closer and pressing a kiss to her neck as her fingers reach up to encircle his arms, holding him back just as tightly, both of them crouched on the floor of Alucard’s childhood bedroom with the world teetering around them precariously. But, for half a moment, he allows himself to smile. “I know.”


	5. Aether

The kitchen is full of the smell of baking bread and cooking meat, heat from the stove bleeding through the little room and making ripples of warmth roll over Sypha in drowsy waves. She and Trevor had spent most of the afternoon collecting herbs and berries from the forest, and Trevor had even somehow managed to catch and kill a remarkably healthy-looking pheasant in the woods, proudly holding it out to her once they had both convened outside the forest a few hours later.

“I… can’t cook,” Sypha had realized aloud once they’d laid everything out on the counter, standing and gazing out at everything they’d collected. It was a pretty impressive haul, considering; on the road and during their travels they would always stock up on bread and cheese from the nearest village, and they’d never really foraged or cooked for themselves, and even before that in the Speaker caravan Sypha had never cooked. Which meant that her culinary skills are less than useful at the moment.

Trevor had only laughed. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Let me handle it.”

Which was how, fifteen minutes later, Sypha finds herself stationed at the counter, chopping up vegetables and roots at Trevor’s orders into careful little cubes, fingers moving clumsily with the knife. Trevor is at the stove, barefoot from having toed off his boots and kicked off his socks and stuffing them onto the windowsill, claiming they’re ‘impediments to his culinary genius’. He’s humming softly as he stirs the massive pot he had managed to find with a wooden spoon, occasionally tasting its contents, then shaking his head and adding something. He’d used the whole pheasant in whatever he was making, waving off Sypha’s protests. “I’m fucking starving, and I’m pretty sure you are, too. And maybe we can even find Alucard and make him eat, he looks like he hasn’t been,” he had said. “Put this in the oven, will you?”

“I didn’t know you could cook,” Sypha says, straightening and putting her hands on her hips as she surveys the kitchen, a flurry of activity even if it’s just the two of them. There’s baking bread in the oven, smelling like absolute heaven even unfinished, a pot of something that also smells delicious simmering on the stove, and a bowlful of fresh berries on the counter. By their standards, this is a feast in every sense of the word.

He only shrugs modestly. “I was on the road for most of my life,” he says. “I had to learn a few skills for coin here and there—and not starve to death while traveling on top of it.”

She brings the diced vegetables over to the pot carefully, tipping them in one handful at a time with Trevor hovering over her watchfully. Once everything is inside the pot and the contents are bubbling gently, Trevor covers it up and steps back, cracking his knuckles. “Okay, now help me with the bread,” he says. “Careful, it’s hot.”

They manage to extricate the bread from the oven with minimal burns, after they’d each donned one of the pair of oven mitts they’d found tucked carefully behind a counter. It sits cooling on the counter, and they sit at the table on either side of it, both flushed and sweaty and tired. Afternoon has given way, creeping by as they had worked, and evening is beginning to spring into the sky, breaking out in hues of the sunset. The kitchen seems all the warmer because of it, the merry, mellow golden light coming from the softly glowing lamps hanging from the ceiling filling the little room with soft, cheerful light. 

“We were only gone two months,” Trevor says softly, and when she looks at him he isn’t looking back, his eyes fixed instead on the table below. His hands are still and steady on its surface, his shoulders slumped. “That’s it. Two months. And so much has happened—so much has gone wrong.”

“I know.” She sighs, resting her head against the back of the chair she’s sitting on. She wonders where Alucard sat, every day when he ate alone. “I suppose… that’s what we get, for leaving him like we did. We didn’t even think about what it might have meant for him…”

“I did,” Trevor says unexpectedly, and she raises her eyes to his, startled. This time he’s looking back, those blue eyes, more familiar to her than her own, gazing back at her tiredly. “I knew… a little, how he was feeling. It’s sort of similar, isn’t it? My whole family burns with my house when I’m twelve, and he watches his mother die, sees his father go mad and has to kill him because of it when he’s twenty-something. Some things sort of even each other out.” He huffs out a humorless laugh. 

“He’s… not in his twenties,” Sypha says haltingly. When Trevor frowns at her quizzically she sighs, resting her elbows on the table and putting her head in her hands. “He told me that he grew up very quickly,” she says through her fingers, her voice muffled. “In the Belmont Hold one day. His aging process was accelerated because of his vampiric blood. And his parents, they met twenty years ago. So he’s probably—”

“Eighteen or nineteen,” Trevor guesses. “Maybe even younger.”

She shrugs helplessly. “Most likely, yes,” she says. 

“Fucking hell.” He leans down, resting his forehead on the table with an audible thunk. “I can’t believe this shit.”

She sighs again, shutting her eyes. There’s silence for a while, punctuated only by the soft bubbling of the pot behind them. It’s so unfair, she thinks, so unfair that all this has happened to him, misfortune after misfortune piled onto him one after the other with no respite. One day he might well give way under the pressure of it all—unless he hasn’t already. 

“Like I said,” Trevor says, breaking her from her reverie, “this place, it’s—it’s killing him. We have to get him the fuck out of here before he goes insane. Too much has happened here in too little time.”

“But your home,” she says, lifting her head. “The library, the books, your family’s legacy—”

“Fuck my family’s legacy,” he says, and there’s an unexpected venom behind the words. “I am my family’s legacy now, not those dusty old books and the crumbling ruins of my old house. It all belongs to me now, so I get to do whatever I want with it. And I say fuck it all. I don’t care what happens to it. There’s got to be some way we can guard the place when we go. I’m not letting him stay here.”

She reaches across the table and takes his hand, and his fingers lace tightly with hers, and he brings their entwined hands to his cheek, sighing. “I can’t—I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if we left him here again,” he says. “Not where there are so many ghosts. It makes me think how I’d like it if you left me in the place I saw my whole family burn up to ash to live forever, take care of it.” He snorts derisively. “‘Take care of it’,” he scoffs. “The fuck was I thinking, giving him two decaying tombs and asking him to make something out of it?”

“Trevor,” she says softly. “You gave him a purpose. A reason to—to wake up every morning and go down there and try to restore the glory of the Belmonts. You gave him that.”

“And look what good that’s brought him.” He shakes his head, looking away. “He probably took them down there,” he says. “Those two—Taka and Sumi. He would have shown them all that stuff and given them access to the place. That’s probably where they got those silver cuffs from.” He scoffs again. “They stayed in his house, ate his food, slept in his beds, took in the knowledge he gave them, then stole his weapons and bound him with them and tried to kill him. Those fucking bastards—he trusted them, for God’s sake. And they just…”

He sighs, squeezing her hand tighter. “We should have been there,” he says. “It should have been us that killed them.”

“Trevor.” Her fingertips brush across his cheek, the rough stubble that she’s tactilely so familiar with. “Stop. If you keep dwelling on what you could have done, you’ll go mad. What’s done is done—we made mistakes, and we have to fix them now. And we will fix them. Okay?”

He shuts his eyes, his breath warm on her palm. “Okay,” he says softly, pressing a soft kiss to her fingers. 

She’s just about to open her mouth to say something when the stove behind them emits a sudden, loud and angry-sounding noise, making both of them jump. The flames below are spitting crossly, tongues of fire leaping out from below the pot. Trevor jumps to his feet, dropping her hand. “Fuck—shit!”

He hurries over to it, Sypha hot at his heels. He pulls the pot off the stove as Sypha struggles to turn the knob to switch the flame off. It doesn’t move, stubbornly staying stuck as the flames only grow higher and higher. Deciding it isn’t worth letting the whole kitchen burn down before she can fix it she hurries to the sink, filling a bucket sitting beneath it and tossing it over the stove quickly. Water splashes everywhere, soaking her robes and spilling all over the floor. The fire goes out immediately, but the stove below is blackened and charred. She looks down at it, frowning. 

“Thank fuck this isn’t ruined,” Trevor says, peering into the pot. Then he looks around, a frown drawing his brows together. “Why is there water everywhere?”

“The flames weren’t going out,” she says with a guilty shrug. 

“Uh,” Trevor says, “I don’t think that worked.” He points, and she looks around at the stove, where the fire has sputtered to life again. She curses, throwing the bucket aside. Trevor moves to stand next to her, bare feet slipping in the puddle of water that’s formed below. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know, try to turn the damn—knob—” She pushes down with all her might, but it refuses to move. “It’s not working,” she says, frustrated. The flames are rising gleefully, reaching burning golden fingers upwards. Trevor tries next, but the flames only dance higher, and the room is beginning to fill with smoke. 

“This fucking thing was working fine fifteen minutes ago,” he says angrily, pulling at it again. “What the hell?”

“Here, let’s both pull.” She settles a hand on the knob and Trevor holds the other edge, both gripping it tight. “Okay,” Sypha says. “Three… two… one—”

They both yank, and the knob spins, loosening. Instead of lowering, the flames leap even higher, nearly singeing her eyebrows. She draws away, startled. 

“Shit,” Trevor says, which sums up the situation pretty well. 

“Now what?” Sypha demands.

“No idea,” Trevor says helplessly, shrugging. 

“Is something burning?” asks a voice from the doorway, and both Trevor and Sypha turn in unison towards it to see a wide-eyed Alucard standing by the door, a hand on the frame. He strides into the kitchen, and they scramble out of the way instinctively as he reaches the burning stove. He grasps the knob and gives it a firm tug, and the flame lowers obediently, dying down as he turns it. 

He turns towards them, both staring at him with wide eyes and stunned expressions, Trevor still holding the wooden spoon from the stew pot. His eyebrows draw together as he looks around, beholding the bread on the table, the stew on the counter and the berries in the bowl, the jug of fresh water and the general mess of the whole place—bread flour all over the floor and vegetable bits scattered across the counters, and an ungodly amount of dirty pots in the sink. He looks back at them, a look of honest surprise on his face. 

“What… what’s all this?” he asks.

“We, uh…” Trevor glances at Sypha, looking uncharacteristically bashful. “We made dinner.”

His eyebrows rise even higher. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

“I can’t,” Sypha says. “Trevor does.”

His brows shoot up further still, in danger of disappearing into his hairline now. “Really?”

“Hey,” Trevor says, shaking the wooden spoon in Alucard’s direction. “I do have my uses besides killing things, you know.”

Alucard appears to be fighting a smile. “Noted,” he says. He looks around again. “It… smells delicious,” he says, and she doesn’t know if it’s just the merry yellow light, but his cheeks look faintly pink. He clears his throat, looking awkward. 

“Tastes even better,” Trevor says, turning and stirring the contents of the pot with a wink at Alucard—he definitely blushes at that—and sliding a clean dish from the rack, holding it out to him. “Eat with us?” he asks. Then without waiting for an answer he says, “No wait, that wasn’t a question. Eat with us. Here.” He loads the plate with a generous amount of stew, placing it on the table in front of where Alucard is standing. 

Alucard hesitates visibly, looking down at it and glancing at Sypha, and she smiles at him in what she hopes is an encouraging way. She moves over to the table with a knife, carefully slicing the bread into even pieces and handing Alucard a slice. He takes it mutely, looking slightly overwhelmed. 

Trevor hands Sypha her own plate before getting one for himself and they sit on either side of Alucard, and she catches Trevor side-eyeing Alucard carefully, as if worried he’ll bolt. They both watch, arrested, as Alucard carefully lifts a spoonful of stew to his lips and takes a bite. 

“Well?” Trevor asks hopefully as Alucard chews, thoughtful almost. He swallows, then turns to Trevor with a little smile. “Better than I ever manage,” he says. “I’m impressed, Belmont.”

“Yeah, well.” He ducks his head, his hair falling forward across his eyes. “Guess all it takes is practice. And the right stuff. There’s some pretty good game around here.”

“I suppose.” Alucard twirls his spoon between his fingers, looking lost in thought. He takes another bite of stew and Trevor appears satisfied with his verdict, shrugging and starting to eat. Sypha hastens to do the same, the rich salty stew melting in her mouth. She sighs happily as she eats, the first real meal she’s eaten since Lindenfeld. She pushes thoughts of the village away from her mind, trying to focus on the present, at the taste of Trevor’s cooking in her mouth and the feeling of Alucard’s shoulder lightly brushing against hers whenever one of them moves to take a bite. 

There’s a companionable silence as they eat, the only sound coming from the clink of cutlery and the creaking of the chairs. They’re all about halfway through their plates—even Alucard, who seems as hungry as they are—when he speaks, his voice soft. “About… about what happened earlier—”

“We don’t have to talk about that now,” Trevor says, sitting back. “I mean, if you don’t want to. We can talk later if you want to.”

“If not now, then when?” He mops up the rest of the stew on his plate with the bread, taking a bite. “Might as well get it over with.”

“We have plenty of time,” Trevor says firmly, pointing a finger at Alucard. “Now shut up and eat.”

He laughs, and Sypha feels something in her chest loosen. It’s the first real laugh of his she’s heard since they’d come back, and it makes warmth fill her heart. “As you wish, Sir Belmont,” he says with an ironic little bow. 

The rest of the meal passes in the same easy silence, punctuated only when Trevor piles more food onto their plates at regular intervals. Neither Sypha nor Alucard complains—which makes her more relieved than she’s willing to admit; she’d thought Alucard wouldn’t eat anything. Finally after Trevor scrapes the pot clean and puts the rest of the bread into a basket on the counter they look around at the mess the kitchen has become, as if seeing it for the first time. 

“I call not doing the dishes,” Trevor says after a pause. 

“I’ll do them,” Sypha offers. 

“I can mop up the floor,” Alucard suggests, and he and Trevor glance at each other quickly, then look away, both slightly pink-cheeked. Sypha feels another bud of warmth bloom in her chest, fighting a smile as she stands up, moving over to the sink. Progress. This is progress. Good progress. 

She gets to work scrubbing the pots and dishes they’d used, hearing the splash of water as Alucard fills up a bucket and the clink of glass as Trevor clears the counters up. There’s something about it all that’s so simple, so blissfully domestic. For a moment everything fades—the bodies outside, the room full of small, bloody shoes, the scars all over Alucard’s body. Everything fades and becomes that one moment, cleaning up the kitchen with both of them and hearing Trevor’s off-tune whistling as he works, seeing Alucard put his hair up into a messy knot at the back of his head through the reflection of the window in front of the sink. 

She smiles to herself just a little as she lowers her eyes towards the dishes again, busying herself washing. She lets herself cling to it, lets herself believe for a moment that everything will be all right in time. _It’s going to be all right,_ she thinks. _We’ll make it out of this together. We’re going to be okay._

And for the first time in a long, long time, she actually allows herself to believe it.

*

There is something heartbreakingly, wonderfully beautiful about cleaning up the kitchen with Trevor and Sypha.

For one thing, they don’t pry. They don’t want him to talk unless he wants to. They’re willing to put aside their own curiosity and concern to make him feel comfortable, something that he’s desperately grateful for but cannot say out loud. They want him to tell them in his own time, when he wants to and when he’s ready. They’re willing to give him space, and willing to let him talk gradually. 

For another thing, they’re _familiar_ to him.

Despite everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, his body and his mind _remember_ Trevor and Sypha. Almost against his will he had found himself relaxing around them, something buried in his subconscious whispering to him that he was safe sitting between them and he was comfortable, that they would protect him and he could trust them with his life. Something about the whole thing had brought back memories of the road, sitting by the campfire between them and hearing their voices and their laughter and wondering if that was what belonging felt like. Flipping through books perched high on the shelf and hearing them bickering happily below, seeing them look up at him occasionally as if to check whether he was still there. Smiling those soft little smiles whenever they saw that he was. Well, Trevor would scowl, but even that in its own way had been… endearing. 

He had thought, initially, that it was just what it seemed to be on the surface. Companionship, perhaps. Friendship, maybe. Camaraderie, even. But then he’d found his eyes clinging to Sypha’s smile, the wistful curve of her full lower lip, the curve of her throat whenever the neck of her robe slipped, the shape of her eyes and the softness of her touch. Found himself staring at the stretch of fabric across Trevor’s shoulders whenever he cast out his whip, at the way the right corner of his lips went up first when he smiled, found himself lulled by the baritone of his voice into a peaceful, serene stupor. 

He had thought he was getting used to them, but instead, what he had failed to realize then was that he hadn’t been. He hadn’t been getting used to them—he had been falling in love. 

“Hey, Alucard,” Trevor calls, and he looks up with a start from where he’s mopping up the floor a few feet away, broken from the deluge of thoughts in his head. Trevor is holding up a pot, an eyebrow raised. “Where does this go?”

He points at the right cabinet, feeling that same odd, buoyant feeling in his chest. “Right there.”

“Great.” He moves over to it, and he passes right by the dolls—oh God, oh fuck, the dolls—as he does, but he says nothing of it, nor does he even look in their direction, though Alucard knows both of them have probably seen them. God, they must think he’s insane. And if they do, they’re not much wrong. 

“What are you thinking about?” asks Sypha’s voice, making him glance at her, startled. She’s smiling a little bemused smile, hands soapy and wet from washing the dishes and cheeks flushed. She’s leaning casually against the sink, and for the first time he notices with surprise that she’s altered the design of her robes and is wearing them differently. For that matter, even Trevor’s clothes are different, the old beige, red and gold having been replaced by black and gold. He tries not to notice that it’s formfitting, and the sleeves look painted to his arms. He tries even harder not to notice his biceps, and fails rather miserably. 

“I’m thinking about that fact that you two probably pillaged some poor tailor’s shop to get yourselves new clothes,” he says, raising a brow at her. 

She giggles, and something in his chest twists agreeably at the sound. “‘Pillaged’ is a strong word,” she says, eyes glittering with mischief. “‘Borrowed’ is a nicer word, don’t you think?”

“Hey, I paid the guy,” Trevor protests, pointing an accusing finger at her from the cabinet. “Sort of. Kind of.”

Sypha rolls her eyes, still grinning, and mouths, _He didn’t_ at Alucard. He finds himself grinning back before he can stop himself, almost like a natural reaction to her and him—to both of them. Already he is falling so easily back into their orbit, into that back-and-forth that he had secretly loved so. As if they had never left.

But they had.

~~they left him and he was alone and then _they_ came and they touched him and they marked him and destroyed him—~~

No. He will not think about ~~Sumi and Taka~~ them. Not when Trevor and Sypha are so close, not when Sypha is smiling at him like ~~she loves him too~~ he is the only thing that matters in the world, not when Trevor is glancing at him every few seconds, coal-black lashes feathering over his cheeks as he cuts his eyes over to him occasionally. Not when they came back ~~to stay together, to be safe together, he means nothing to them~~ for him. 

He feels himself slipping again, threatening to send him reeling into the vast chasm of grief and chaos that had opened up inside him after forcing those first two bodies through pikes and driven them into the earth outside his doors. He still remembers it, the memory of that night in all its grisly detail. Remembers feeling remorseless as he sharpens two branches he had snapped off the trees outside, remembers remembering his father, thinking of him and thinking of how proud he must be of his son. Remembers feeling their skin and bone and insides giving way as he forces the pikes through their dead bodies, carefully navigating their anatomy so that it tears through their esophagi and out through their mouths, open forever in a silent scream. Remembers the blood that had poured from their slit throats, from between their thighs, dripping down their arms and fingers and legs. He’d dressed them to give them some semblance of modesty beyond the veil of life, though they hadn’t deserved it. Perhaps he simply hadn’t wanted to see their naked bodies, not after that night, not when he could still feel those very bodies pressed against his own, skin against skin against skin—

“Alucard?” Sypha’s voice breaks through the haze of sex and blood and betrayal in his head, bringing him sharply back to the present. He realizes he’s gripping the mop so tightly his knuckles are chalk-white, and he’s staring blankly at the ground. He looks up quickly, feeling nausea churning his stomach and wishing desperately that he hadn’t eaten so much. It had been the first real dinner he had had since that day; he wasn’t starving himself, but he wasn’t eating too well, either. 

“Are you all right?” she asks, moving towards him, and for some reason he finds himself recoiling. _It’s just Sypha,_ says a voice in his mind. _You can trust her, you know her._

She puts a careful hand on his shoulder—and his whole body relaxes. He blinks, surprised; he’d been expecting himself to recoil even further, tense or even throw her off. Instead a deep feeling of ease spreads through his limbs, making his fingers go nearly limp on the mop, which wobbles dangerously as they do. She smells familiar and alien all at the same time—magic and sunlight, Sypha and energy. Trevor’s scent is laced faintly with hers, too—wood char and leather and cinnamon. 

He wants that—wants both their scents on him, wants to drown in both of them and beg them to do whatever they want with him and erase the other scents from his body, the scents he has tried so hard to get rid of but still cling to him, a perverse reminder of what he had allowed them to take from him. He finds himself straining towards her touch, his eyes falling shut halfway. 

“I’m fine,” he says after a while, and to his surprise, he means it. “Just… I drifted off for a minute, is all.”

“Then I think it’s time we all went to bed,” Sypha says softly, standing on her tiptoes to press a tiny little kiss to his cheek. He thinks he actually feels his heart stop for a second before resuming beating again, but at three times its regular pace. She smiles at him, and it quickens to four. He really is fallen, in every sense of the word. 

“Kitchen’s done,” Trevor calls, moving over to stand beside the two of them. To his amazement and secret gratification, he stands right next to Alucard, effectively sandwiching him between them. He tries not to let his blush show, stuffing the mop back into the closet behind them. “There are several unused rooms in the east wing of the castle,” he says, reaching up to tug nervously at a stray lock of hair falling into his eyes. “The two of you can have one.”

Sypha seems to want to say something, but apparently thinks better of it, instead squeezing his arm gently. “That would be lovely,” she says warmly. “Thank you, Alucard.”

“It’s—it’s nothing,” he says, torn between wanting to ask them if he can curl up between them while they sleep and wanting to claw his skin open at the feeling of two bodies on either side of him, pressing him into the mattress. He settles for neither, instead swallowing and nodding. 

“I hope you have somewhere to sleep,” she’s saying as he leads them through the castle. “And that you’ve been sleeping.”

“I have a room,” he says. “And I… have been trying to sleep, yes.”

“Trying, huh?” Trevor asks. “Nightmares?”

“Of a sort.”

He only nods at that, letting it go graciously as they draw up to a door in the east wing, one right across from Alucard’s (Sypha had insisted on a room close to his in case she ‘needed anything’ in the night, which Alucard suspects is a ploy to check whether he’s sleeping or not). He opens it, gesturing. “I hope it’s enough,” he says. “There’s a bathroom inside as well, so you needn’t keep coming out.”

“It’s perfect,” Sypha says firmly, finally—and rather regretfully, he thinks, and to his own regret in turn—letting go of his arm. She leans up, giving him another little kiss on the cheek. He feels himself blush, turning away before either of them can see. He bids them a hasty goodnight and beats a quick retreat, shutting the door of his room behind him and sagging against it, breathing hard. 

He stays there awhile, closing his eyes and doing nothing but breathe for a few minutes, letting all the tension go out of him. He’s pleasantly full for the first time in a while, and drowsier than he’s felt in weeks. He can still feel the phantom touch of Sypha’s hand on his arm, the featherlight brush of her lips on his cheek. He shakes his head to clear it of the memories, moving further into the room. He strips off his shirt, letting it fall heedlessly onto the floor. His pants follow, discarded without a care. He pulls on a loose nightshirt, not looking down at himself as he does. 

He’s learned to stop looking at the scars, at the reminders painted all over his body. He’s learned to hate them, to look at them with disgust and contempt whenever he does look at them. They are brands of his weakness, his human trust. Two things he makes sure will never be again: weak, and human. 

He collapses onto the bed, rolling over onto his back and closing his eyes, and he is asleep before they can even fall shut all the way.

*

_Moonlight falls onto the bed in rich, creamy silver pools, lighting the insides of his eyes and forcing them open. He tosses and turns, unable to fall asleep, wishing he could. Sleep has evaded him since he’s been alone, and what few hours he can manage to drift off are plagued with nightmares of killing his father, seeing the ghostly remains of his decaying body reaching for him with rotting hands, mouth agape and lurching forward, as if to take him in his arms in one last phantom embrace. He always wakes with a shout, sitting bolt upright with sweat sticking his hair to his forehead and his nightshirt to his back. He can never fall asleep again afterwards._

_He hears the doors creak open and sits up, feeling concern draw his brows together as he beholds two familiar figures silhouetted in the doorway, limned in soft golden light. “What’s wrong?” he asks, thinking immediately of night creatures creeping up on the castle by night, perhaps vengeful vampire slaves of his father’s, returning to finish unfinished business._

_“Nothing’s wrong,” Trevor says softly, drawing up to his right as Sypha moves to his left, both sitting on the edges of the bed beside him. “Everything is fine,” she says, reaching out. Trevor does the same, both their hands on his chest, slight yet insistent pressures. He looks up at them, hardly daring to believe what is happening._

_“You’ve been so alone,” he croons, and he exhales, something inside him crying out that he is right, that he has not felt the touch of another for so long. Much less a touch like this—the likes of which he has never felt. Sypha smiles a catlike smile at him, and suddenly he’s breathless. “It’s time for your reward,” she says._

_His breath puffs out in a startled gasp as they push him down suddenly, his back hitting the mattress. He feels his lips part, surprise and shock and disbelief mingling in his chest as she takes his face in her hands, pressing a kiss to his lips. He’s stunned, unable to process what’s happening, unable to respond beyond closing his eyes. Her lips are soft and careful on his own, and she tastes like fresh, cool clear water. She draws away and he stares at her, still shocked into immobility, still reeling from their sudden move._

_A moment later he feels Trevor’s fingers on his cheek, turning his face. He complies, allowing the other man to angle his face towards Alucard’s, leaning down and kissing him. This time his mind comes to life, making a surge of sudden desire shoot through his body. His hands reach up, fingers clenching on Trevor’s shoulders as he meets his lips with his own, shutting his eyes and kissing him back. It’s over far too soon, and when he pulls away he’s left to gasp for breath with the taste of both of them lingering in his mouth, heady and making something inside him clench._

_They both lean over him, tasting and taking, Sypha’s tongue tracing down the column of his throat as Trevor’s hands bunch in the hem of his nightshirt, pushing it up his thighs. He leans up and pulls off his own thin shirt, baring himself to Alucard’s hungry gaze. He’s beautiful, the impossible breadth of his bare shoulders and the hard, chiseled muscles of his stomach and abdomen, the swell of his biceps and the smattering of dark hair across his chest that arrows down his stomach. His eyes follow it downward and his breath catches in his throat, desire exploding inside him; he’s gorgeous._

_The neck of Sypha’s gown hangs off her shoulders as she leans to kiss him, her breasts flattening against his chest as their lips meet. He lets his hands wander, down her side and to the curve of her hips, fingers finding her soft skin. He pulls her closer and she moans into his mouth, the sound making an arrow of heat pierce his body. Her eyes are wide and dark when she pulls away, lips flushed from kisses._

_Her gown soon joins Trevor’s on the floor, and Alucard’s follows soon after. He can feel their skin against his, Trevor’s hardness against his back and Sypha’s softness against his chest. Her tongue is in his mouth, Trevor’s hands wandering over him, exploring every inch of him, his touch careful and reverent almost. He feels lost beneath it all suddenly, tears gathering in his eyes at the feeling of being desired and being loved, being cared for by two people he has wanted for so long._

_He feels something warm and metallic and heavy splatter over his skin suddenly, making his eyes snap open with a gasp. Blood stains the sheets, covers the curtains, drips from his arms and chest and legs from where he’s bound with silver wires. He can see Trevor and Sypha above him, their throats slit, their dead bodies rising like disjointed, macabre puppets on grisly strings. He can only watch, helpless, as stakes pierce through them, tethering them to the mattress, their blood dripping onto his body._

_“Only we can have you like that,” Sumi’s voice whispers in his ear, and she coalesces from thin air, her own throat slit and her cheek eaten away, a rotting corpse, leaning above him. “Only we can see you this way.”_

_“Your body belongs to us,” Taka says, appearing next to her, both his eyes pecked away and his mouth gaping open, blood trickling from between his lips. They join hands, raising their blades above his chest. “We have claimed you and you can give yourself to no one else.”_

_“Please,” he tries to say, but when he opens his mouth all that comes out is more blood. “Please—”_

_They bring their swords down._

*

His eyes open.

He gasps for breath, sitting up with a sudden jerk. He can hear his own ragged breaths, feel his pulse racing, feel his skin crawling. He looks around wildly to see if they’re still there, if their bloody, rotting corpses still hover above him, waiting to deliver him his fate. 

Instead he turns his head and sees—

“Sumi?” he gasps.


	6. Ananke

Sypha gazes down at Alucard half-propped up on the bed, breathing hard and eyes glassy and unseeing, and blinks back tears. 

They’d heard him moaning and crying out in his sleep from across the hall, and it had eventually proven to be too much for Sypha to handle; she had gotten out of bed, throwing on a dressing gown she’d found in one of the closets and hurrying out of the room. He had been tossing and turning in bed, fingers clenching and unclenching on the sheets, pained gasps and groans forcing themselves past his lips. 

He’s dressed in only a loose shirt, and she feels something cold and ugly open up inside her when she sees the scars that twine across his whole body, wrists and arms, shoulders and chest, hips and thighs and legs. Livid and dark even now, brands of his betrayal, imprinted onto his skin forever. Not for the first nor the last time, she feels a white-hot bolt of hatred spear through her, hatred that makes her wish those two had still been alive when they arrived so that she could kill them herself, and do it slowly. She’d savor every second of it. 

She and Trevor had called his name over and over, and when he’d finally woken, sitting up ramrod straight with that wild, cornered look in his eyes he had taken one look at her and said, “Sumi?”

“No, Alucard, it’s me,” she says as softly as she can without letting her voice crack. “It’s Sypha—”

“What more do you want from me?” he asks helplessly, and tears are gathering in his eyes, the gold of his iris swimming and reflecting the flame she’s conjured between her fingers. His lower lip wobbles, his arms wrapping around his chest as if to protect himself. “Haven’t you taken enough?”

“Alucard, it was just a dream,” she says, reaching out a tentative hand. Her fingers just brush his shoulder and he cringes away from her, hissing as he lashes out. His open palm strikes her directly in the chest and she stumbles backward, the wind knocked out of her. Trevor catches her, an arm around her waist steadying her on her feet. 

“Don’t touch me,” he snarls. “Not again—not after what you—”

“Alucard,” Trevor says, letting go of Sypha and moving forward, kneeling by the bed so that their eyes are on a level. “It’s not real. Wake up—it was just a dream.”

His chest hitches up and down, his wide eyes darting between them wildly. A single tear traces its way down his cheek, silvered by the moonlight. “A dream?”

“Yeah, just a dream,” Trevor says, his voice soft and soothing, the same voice he had used to calm the horses whenever they had been especially skittish. He holds out a careful, cautious hand, and slowly Alucard reaches out and takes it. Their fingers lace together tightly, and she thinks she sees Alucard’s shaking. He blinks, the pressure appearing to ground him, allowing him to separate dream from reality. He looks up at both of them standing by his bed, Sypha clutching the loose billowing dressing gown to her chest and Trevor half-dressed and hair sleep-mussed, with his hand in Alucard’s own. 

His lips part. “Trevor?”

“Yeah.” He grips Alucard’s fingers tighter. “It’s us.”

He exhales shakily, blinking, his eyes clearing. He looks up at Sypha, and she feels something in her chest twist when she sees what she recognizes as guilt in his eyes. He pulls his hand away from Trevor’s hastily, looking away from them as he draws his knees up to his chest, curling in on himself protectively. “I—I’m sorry,” he says, his voice shaking. “I don’t know what I—you didn’t have to… see that.” He wipes at his eyes, turning his face away. 

“Alucard.” Sypha wants to reach out, wants to fold him into her arms and hold him against her, wants it more than she thinks she’s ever wanted anything in her life. But she knows she can’t, not when all she can see behind her eyes is how he’d cringed away from her, guilt and anger and fear twisting his face. What had they done to him? “We want to help you. Please, let us help you.”

He exhales, wrapping his arms around his knees and gazing into middle distance. “You want to know what they did?” he asks. His voice is cold, and she feels a shiver slide down her spine, and suddenly she doesn’t want to hear what he’s going to say next. “I didn’t lie; they did come here asking for my help. I did teach them. Taught them how to fight, how to kill vampires. I took them down into the Hold. I thought…” He falters, blinking rapidly, then swallows hard and goes on. “I thought you might approve,” he says, glancing at Trevor. “That you might like the idea of teaching and training a newer generation of monster hunters, carry your family’s legacy forward. I did it… I did it for you, for the most part.” 

She sees Trevor’s jaw clench, and in the silvery moonlight his eyes look oddly bright and glassy. Without a word he climbs up onto the bed beside Alucard, not touching him but simply sitting next to him, silent and careful. Alucard seems slightly emboldened by the gesture and sighs, shutting his eyes as he continues speaking. 

“So I taught them and they learned, and the days went by,” he says. “They grew impatient, though I was too blind to see it. They decided I was untrustworthy and planned to get rid of me so they could take the castle back to Japan. But they didn’t attack me openly.” He squeezes his eyes shut further, fingers shaking. “They…” His breathing turns heavy and labored, and he presses his forehead to his knees. 

“Alucard,” Trevor says quietly, and he holds up a hand, shaking his head. “If I stop I won’t be able to go on.”

He opens his eyes again. “They came to my bedchamber one night,” he says, and he sounds flat and remote. “I couldn’t sleep, so I heard them come in. I thought something was wrong, that something had attacked, or vengeful slaves of my father’s had returned, or… something. I don’t know. But I didn’t expect them to…” He sighs. “I didn’t expect them to say they were giving me my ‘reward’ for teaching them.” He chokes on what could be a laugh, but his eyes are swimming again. Not tears of pain or sadness, Sypha realizes, but tears of… shame. 

“I was so stunned, so overwhelmed, that I didn’t say no. I… liked them, and I thought they wanted me, and I wanted… I wanted to matter. I wanted to be wanted, to be desired. I’d never… taken anyone into my bed before, and they were there and willing and I…” He looks lost suddenly, and Sypha feels a cold sort of horror spread down her whole body, horror and rage that makes it hard to breathe. “I allowed them to take whatever they wanted from me,” he says, softly. “And I liked it. I’d never felt that way before, and I let them, I wanted them. But then they turned on me. When I was at my most vulnerable, they pinned me down and got the cuffs on my wrists. They…” He looks down at himself, at the ropy burns all over his body. “They tried to kill me,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t get away, couldn’t even shapeshift. But I still had my sword. They didn’t know I can control it with my mind. I slit their throats where they knelt above me with their blades, and it was all for nothing.” The tears have spilled from beneath his lashes and they catch the moonlight, turning into droplets of quicksilver that roll down his cheeks. “I hadn’t withheld anything from them. I killed them and it was for nothing.”

He drags in a ragged breath, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’s shaking, soft, quiet sobs wracking his whole body, tremors that make his shoulders heave. “I let them… I let them _use_ me like that. I just… I feel so _filthy,”_ he whispers, so quietly she barely hears the words. 

She looks up, feeling tears fill her own eyes, to see Trevor gazing back at her over Alucard’s bowed head, and she feels her breath catch in her throat when she sees his expression. He looks—he looks livid. In all the months she’s known him she has never seen such anger on his face, and she knows in her heart that it’s in part anger with himself as much as it is anger with the people who did this. For not being there. For not thinking of him when they were supposed to. For thinking it was all right to leave him here alone, vulnerable and desperate for contact and broken. For not loving him when he needed them most.

“Alucard, it isn’t your fault,” Sypha says, and this time no matter how hard she tries not to her voice cracks. Her throat releases the tears and she feels them slide down her face, her eyes stinging. “It isn’t your fault that you—”

“That I trusted them?” He lifts his head, grief and humiliation still pulling visibly at his face. “That I let them—that I let them defile me? Take advantage of me? But it is my fault; I let them do it. I was quite willing, and I even—” He looks away. “I thought they… I thought they could be—” He exhales shakily, shutting his eyes. He seems to be steeling himself visibly, to say something excruciatingly difficult. “I thought they could be what you could not,” he says softly. “I thought that I might forget you as you had forgotten me, in time, and that I might come to love them instead. That I could move on from you at last. But they weren’t you. They couldn’t be you. Even if, as they pleasured me all I could see _was_ you.” He chokes out a half-laugh. “It felt unfair to them, at least until they bound me. Then the illusion shattered, and I…”

He sniffles, resting his forehead on his knees again, avoiding their eyes. He doesn’t speak again, so instead Sypha speaks for him, kneeling beside him on the bed, feeling the mattress dip beneath her weight with the creak of springs. “Alucard,” she says gently, “may I hold you?”

He goes entirely still, and for half a heartbeat she thinks he will drive them away, turn away from them and not allow them to get close, not allow them to help. But then he gives the slightest of nods, hunching over further as if to curl into a ball and disappear entirely. She can still see the tracks his tears have made down his cheeks, traced with salt and turned to pale white lines in the moonlight. She feels an odd sort of emotion swelling in her chest, something tender and blazing all at once, and she lets it engulf her, scooting closer to him on the bed and slowly, carefully putting her arms around him and pulling him close. 

It is like holding a loosed arrow; he’s shaking all over, fine wracking tremors that run up and down his whole body, and he’s stiff—rigid almost, knuckles blanching where his hands are clenched on his own shoulders. She moves closer, an arm sliding around the backs of his shoulders while her other hand comes to rest in his hair, carefully holding him against her. She feels something grip at the dressing gown she’d pulled on and then he’s moving, his own hands clutching at the fabric at her back as he presses his face into her shoulder, his lips warm on the curve of her neck where the gown has slipped. 

She wriggles closer to position herself half-underneath him to make it more comfortable, his long bare legs tangling with hers as she does. She glances up, feeling the tears on her own face but not caring as her eyes find Trevor’s. “Get over here, Belmont,” she says, her voice wobbling. “There’s room for three.”

The corner of his lips flick up in a halfhearted smile, then he too moves closer, his own legs hooking over Alucard’s and underneath Sypha’s as he rests his chin on Alucard’s shoulder, one of his arms come around his waist, the other around Sypha’s shoulders. Alucard melts a little under the added touch, a soft exhale puffing onto her collarbone. Trevor is far warmer than she is, and without the added barrier of a shirt he’s even warmer, his body curled almost protectively around Alucard’s more slender one. 

They stay like that for what feels like eons, arms and legs tangled together, sitting entwined on the bed, feeling each other’s breath and heartbeat not in sync but in harmony nonetheless, melding into a soft, slow melody—disjointed, perhaps, and more than a little broken; but then again aren’t they all, just a little?

“Why did you come back?” Alucard asks softly, his lips moving against her throat, an ever so slight pressure. “Tell me the truth like I told you the truth.”

She shuts her eyes, exhaling as she opens them again. She gently lifts his head, tilting his face up towards hers, and even with tears glimmering on his face and spangling his lashes, and his hair tangled around her fingers he is beautiful, like the portrait of a mourning angel. And maybe his wings are broken and bloody and he has scars all over his body but still he is ethereal and lovely, still he is as graceful as a falling star. She leans down, and his lips part just far enough for his fangs to glint in the light. 

“We came back because we knew that even if we had the world, the world would never be enough because we did not have you,” she whispers. “We came back because everything meant nothing without you.”

His eyes rise to her own, opaque, liquid gold. She tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, leaning forward, and he doesn’t move back as she does. “We came back,” she says softly, “because we love you.” And when she kisses him softly, he doesn’t pull away. 

She feels his eyes close, feels his long damp lashes feather against the tops of her cheeks. It’s a slow, simple kiss, merely a careful press of lips. He’s entirely still, and suddenly she thinks she has gone too far, that it’s too soon and she should have held her tongue. She pulls back, and his eyes open, molten gold and entirely unreadable. She swallows, an apology already rising to her lips when his fingers tighten suddenly on her dressing gown, half-lifting himself up as he yanks her closer. She has time only to gasp before he’s kissing her hungrily, one of his hands reaching up to tangle in her hair, the other lacing with Trevor’s at her waist. 

His lips are soft and slightly chapped and the kiss tastes of salt, but she’s far too gone to care. It’s messy almost, neither of them exercising caution, both trying to press as close as they can to the other. It’s as if a dam has broken, all of the grief and anger and sadness and hope and love spilling through after centuries of being held back. His fingers pull at the dressing gown to lever himself up and it slips down her shoulders, exposing the thin sleep chemise she’s wearing beneath it. He catches her gasp in his mouth, his lips parting her own as his tongue brushes against hers. They both moan at the contact, their breath mingling between their lips. She feels something sharp slice into her lower lip, drawing blood, but she doesn’t care. Nothing matters anymore. Nothing else in all the world but this. 

He yanks himself away after what feels like forever and no time at all, breathing hard. Sypha is similarly breathless, both of them merely staring at each other, as if unable to comprehend the last few seconds. His eyes are wide and dark, his pupils blown wide. The laces of his shirt are loose, the collar gaping open at the neck. She feels a pulse of intense wanting tear through her, so strong she actually feels it, like a punch in the stomach. She wants nothing more than to have him and let him have her, her and Trevor, here and now—but she knows she has to wait. She can’t rush into things, not when everything is so delicate. 

“Sypha,” he says, his voice uneven and slightly rough, sounding as dazed as she feels, “I—I’m—”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says, and she too sounds stunned, the words tumbling under and over each other. “Never be sorry for things like that—that was…” She laughs a little, shaking her head and resting her forehead against his. “That was amazing, Alucard.”

“I think all of us can agree on that front,” says Trevor’s voice, and they both turn in unison to see him grinning at them from Adrian’s other side. “I had a fairly good view from here, you know.”

Adrian laughs a little, bumping Trevor’s shoulder with his. “Voyeur.”

“I’m willing to be more than just a voyeur if you’d let me,” he says, dropping a single eyelid in a lazy wink, and Adrian blushes visibly. “Oh?”

“Mmhmm.” He drops his chin onto Alucard’s shoulder again, lifting a brow. “But maybe later.” He places a little kiss on the curve of his neck before drawing away, and Sypha hides a smile at the faintly deprived look on Alucard’s face as he does. “Right now, you have some sleep to catch up on.” He points a finger at the dhampir, who blinks. “I’m willing to bet you’ve barely caught a wink since—well, since that night,” Trevor goes on. 

“Not really, no,” says Alucard quietly. 

“That’s bad. The less you sleep, the more you think. The more you think, the worse everything gets.” He pulls Alucard down beside him as he stretches out on the bed, Alucard’s hair fanning out across the pillows like a golden flag. Sypha lies down on his other side, careful not to touch him, wondering if it will be too intrusive, too familiar. She settles for carefully combing through his hair with her fingers, the thick golden locks soft and pliant against her skin. He’s curled up on his side, facing Trevor, the curves of his shoulders outlined clearly through his shirt. He’s always been slender, svelte almost, with a lean layer of muscle over his form. And while he isn’t skinny now, he’s definitely lost weight. 

“What happened out there?” he asks suddenly, and she frowns, pausing in the act of stroking his hair. “What do you mean?” Trevor asks, sounding as perplexed as she feels. 

“I… I never asked you what’s happening outside,” he says. “You were gone nearly two months. And I know something happened out there somewhere, something that’s another reason for your return. What happened?”

Sypha exhales, forcing thoughts of Lindenfeld from her mind, the roomful of bloody shoes and the night creature shackled in the priory basement, the portal to hell and how none of it mattered in the end. “Maybe,” she says softly, “that is a story for another night. A more peaceful night, perhaps.”

“All right,” he says quietly, and she moves closer, shucking off her dressing gown and allowing it to fall on her side of the bed as she does. She feels his hair tangle around her fingers, softer than corn silk and just as pale. “Now sleep,” she whispers. 

He exhales softly, and on a sudden, unidentifiable impulse she puts a careful arm around his waist, her fingers lacing with his where his hand rests on the sheets. He grips her hand back, but says nothing, and she allows herself one last smile before she closes her eyes and sleeps.

*

He falls asleep in between Trevor and Sypha, one of Sypha’s hands in his and the other in Trevor’s, the scent of both of them seeping into his skin and the sound of their breath in his ears. He sleeps with the taste of Sypha lingering in his mouth and the feeling of both of them there and close.

He falls asleep for the first time in weeks, and he knows he is safe.

He knows he is loved.

He falls asleep with both of them—with the only _them_ that ever mattered. 

And he has no nightmares.


	7. Hemera

_“Burn my house down.”_

_He’s standing above the Judge’s prone form, Sypha kneeling beside him, her fingers coated in slippery, viscous blood. There’s a blade buried in his gut, and judging by the blood trickling in steady streams from his mouth, it has pierced something vital. Trevor had known the moment he had seen the wound that the Judge would not live._

_He had been a good man, a better man than either of them had deserved for how much they had trusted him, in the beginning. He had been willing to take them in, willing to respect them for what they could give his people. He doesn’t deserve to die, not like this. Not bleeding to death outside a ruined, desecrated priory, by the hands of a madman who, against all odds, had gotten away—or so he had thought then._

_Lindenfeld is burning._

_The town is gone, ruined beyond repair. There is nothing and nobody left, and everyone and everything is dead. The Judge is dead, and so is Sala. Dozens of innocent people, who had done nothing wrong, had been consumed by the Visitor. At least Saint Germain had gotten his happy ending, but what is that one victory against a thousand losses? No matter how hard they had tried, they hadn’t saved Lindenfeld. They had failed._

_Trevor pushes the door open._

_Shoes, heartbreakingly small. Stained with blood. Some almost fresh, some dried already to nearly black. Dozens of them. Stacked on shelf upon shelf upon shelf. Filling the little room. Sickening realization, and crushing disappointment. Anger, hopelessness, grief. He wonders if he will ever feel anything else ever again._

_“He found his little pleasures,” he hears himself say._

_Men are not merciful creatures. He had learned this the hard way, twelve years old and watching his home burn to the ground. Throwing himself at one of the priests with a torch, animalistic grief and anger making everything go red for a moment. Seeing a flash of silver slip into the man’s hand from beneath his sleeve. Feeling pain unlike anything he had ever felt exploding across his face, feeling his eye swell shut as blood drips from it instead of tears. Stumbling into the forest, shivering from fear and pain and infection. Hoping he could die so that he’d see his family again._

_But to discover that someone he had trusted, someone he had even begun to come to like, had been more a monster than even the demons he’s slain and sent to hell—it is an unwelcome reminder that the world is not painted in black and white, and perhaps there are worse things out there than night creatures and Dracula’s curse._

_He can see one of the little boys, laughing and carefree as all little boys are, with wide eyes and an even wider smile. His shoes are red, the color of blood._

_As Trevor watches he begins to fall, losing his footing on the unevenly packed earth. He cries out, a hand reaching out for Trevor, his lips shaping the words,_ help me _. Trevor reaches back, trying to catch him before he hits the ground, trying to save him—but even as he grabs the boy’s hand his skin turns to ash in his fingers and the boy falls, his small body broken at the bottom of the pit, speared on the Judge’s spikes. As he stares down at it the boy’s corpse begins to change, close-cropped brown hair turning long and lustrous gold, his body growing tall and lush, his wide-open, unseeing green eyes shimmering into dark amber. He falls to his knees by the edge of the pit, and when he looks down all he sees is bloody shoes impaled on the pikes scattered across the bottom, and the broken body of one more person he loved who he could not save._

_“You let us die,” whispers a voice from below, from the small, frangible bones littering the bottom of the pit. “You trusted the man who killed us and took his trophies from our corpses.”_

_“I didn’t know,” he tries to say, and his voice cracks. “I didn’t know who he was—”_

_“Now join us.” The one voice becomes dozens, little girls and little boys, children,_ children _—_

_“Come play with us,” the laughing dead voices say, and skeletal hands begin to pull him into the pit, down towards death waiting below. “You are not entirely blameless; you left him alone, in his father’s tomb and your family’s tomb. You left him. You deserve to die.”_

_“I’m sorry,” he tries to say, but somewhere he knows they’re right, he left him and he deserves this. He closes his eyes against the tears that threaten to rise, and then he surrenders, allowing them to pull him down into the depths towards Alucard’s body, allowing himself to die. They’re right, he deserves it, after everything he has done—_

_He lets them take him, hearing their laughter ringing in his ears, and he falls._

“No!”

His eyes open and he sits up with a gasp, his heart slamming so hard in his chest that it makes his whole body shudder back and forth. His eyes don’t immediately recognize his surroundings and he feels himself tense at the sight of gauzy curtains rippling in the breeze from an open window, an unfamiliar room around him and an unfamiliar bed beneath him. 

Then memory begins to take hold again, flooding his mind, making his rigid limbs loosen somewhat. He slumps back against the headboard of Alucard’s bed, breathing hard. One night. One night of peaceful sleep without those fucking nightmares is all he asks. And now with the added guilt and anger and grief that had come with returning to Alucard again his brain is coming up with all sorts of shit that’s a whole new flavor of horrible, and of course said dhampir had to be a part of it in the worst way possible. 

“Are you all right?”

He turns, startled, to see a pair of sleepy golden eyes blinking up at him from beside him, squinting past the sunlight that streams in through the windows. He sighs, letting his head fall back onto the wood behind him with a thunk and closing his eyes. “Yeah, I’m great,” he says, his voice rough. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“It’s nearly noon, you know. And I’m a light sleeper.” He sits up beside Trevor, peering at him with something that’s part concern and part something else he can’t quite identify. “Nightmare?”

“Yeah, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Happens all the time.” He swallows, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”

“Well enough. Don’t change the subject,” he adds. “Something truly terrible must have happened before you came back here,” he says softly, a careful hand reaching up and brushing an errant lock of hair out of Trevor’s eyes. His touch is soft but no less electrifying, and when Trevor opens his eyes he doesn’t pull away, his fingers lingering on Trevor’s cheek. “What was it? What did you see that left such ghosts in those eyes of yours that have seen it all?”

“Relearned some old lessons I was foolish enough to forget,” he says on an exhale of breath. “Nothing new.”

“I’m sorry,” says Alucard.

“Why the hell are you sorry?” He reaches up, fingers tangling with Alucard’s at his cheek. “It’s us who should be sorry. We fucking left you here, as if everything would be all right and nothing would go wrong. And now—” 

“Blaming ourselves will get us nowhere, you know,” he says, his thumb stroking lightly over the arch of his cheekbone. “And I was so involved in my own mess that I never stopped to think of your own struggles. I wasn’t there when you needed me—that’s why you came back, isn’t it? To stay somewhere you know you’re safe. I denied you that, and instead of welcoming you I burdened you even further with my own problems, the weight of which you should not bear. I made your plight even worse than it was already, and for that I’m sorry.”

He thinks he can actually feel something in his chest twist at the words, at the total sincerity behind his voice. “Shit, Alucard,” he says. “Don’t fucking talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like every bad thing that happens to any of us is your fault. We had no idea what you were going through, none at all. We were off in some fucking shithole of a town, having—I don’t know, fucking adventures or whatever, and here you were—you—I mean, portals to hell are one thing, but you didn’t have to go through what you did alone. It was a shitty thing to do on our part.”

“Portals to hell?” He arches an eyebrow, fingers falling away from Trevor’s face. 

“Later,” Trevor reminds him. “And now who’s changing the subject?”

Alucard laughs softly. “All right, fine. But I really am sorry.”

“Yeah,” Trevor says, his heart heavy. “Me too.”

They sit in silence for a while, shoulders touching lightly, and Trevor can’t help but notice the scars that wind their way down Alucard’s legs, cross over his chest and encircle his arms, a bright angry pink in the sunlight. He wonders if they’re permanent, if he will carry these marks with him forever, a gruesome reminder every time he sees them, of what happened to him. He hopes they’ll fade in time, paling into old memories that will one day be lost to the endless ravages of time. 

“They’re ugly, aren’t they?” Alucard asks, bringing Trevor out of his reverie. He too is looking down at the scars, seeming thoughtful almost.

Trevor doesn’t think there’s any point in denying it, nor does he want to lie. “Yeah,” he says softly, reaching down to trace the line of it up his thigh. Alucard’s eyes lower to track the movement of his fingers, slowly following the lacerations twining up his skin, inching towards the hem of his shirt. “Will they fade?”

“I don’t know,” Alucard says. The scars feel smoother than his skin, stretched and faintly raised against Trevor’s fingers. “I hope they do. I want them to.”

He raises his eyes to Trevor’s, his lips slightly parted. Trevor’s finger hooks under the hem of the nightshirt, drawing it up just an inch, and he sees Alucard swallow, a harsh exhale puffing past his lips. “They cover me,” he says, and his voice is slightly uneven. “Neck to ankles. I can’t hide them.”

He rucks the shirt up another inch, and Alucard’s eyes close. He’s entirely still, like a statue carved from marble—pale skin, pale hair, pale translucent fabric covering him, and that inhumanly angelic face. “I don’t know if it’s a welcome deterrent for future bedmates or an unfortunate one.”

Another inch. “So you think nobody will want to fuck you because of these scars?” he asks, and Alucard’s lashes flutter slightly, but he doesn’t open his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says. “I know I wouldn’t want to. Not if I knew how they’d gotten there.”

“You know,” says Trevor, withdrawing his hand where the hem of Alucard’s nightshirt threatens to ride up a bit too far, “when people say ‘go fuck yourself’, this isn’t what they mean.”

Adrian’s eyes open as he laughs, his gaze straying to Trevor’s hand that now rests innocently on his thigh where his shirt covers his skin. He cuts his eyes back up to Trevor’s face, and his cheeks are a little pink. “Very funny, Belmont,” he says, and for just a second he sounds like his old snooty self again, the Alucard he had known on the road and in the Hold and the Alucard that he’d fought night hordes and vampires and even Dracula himself with, the Alucard he’d fallen in love with and hadn’t realized until it had been too late. 

“But honestly,” he goes on, more softly, “I do think myself far less desirable now. Not just—physically. Who would want to bed someone who cringes and panics when you pin him down?”

“Someone who wants to be pinned down, I suppose,” Trevor says after a pause. 

Alucard snorts. “That was rhetorical, Belmont. I’m—I’m a fucking wreck. I wish I could say you being here has made everything better, but it hasn’t. I want to be with the two of you, I want to be part of what you want to give me, but how can anything ever be the way we want it if I can’t even stand being touched like that anymore? How long will it take for their phantoms’ hands on me to fade? What if something in me has broken and I’ll never be able to—” He takes in a shuddering breath, looking away. “I want you, but at the same time I know I won’t be able to have you without remembering what happened the last time I allowed a young man and woman into my bed. I’ll ruin everything. It’ll never work.”

“Hey,” Trevor says, fingers lightly squeezing his thigh. Alucard stubbornly averts his eyes, and Trevor sighs. “Hey, Alucard, just—fucking look at me. Look at me.”

He turns hesitantly, and Trevor reaches out, tucking a stray lock of blond behind his ear. “There’s a hell of a lot more to a relationship than just sex. A _lot_ more. If you’re uncomfortable, we don’t have to do a thing. Hell, we won’t even touch you if you don’t want us to. But that is not going to stop us from—from loving you, or wanting you. There’s a lot of ways you can want a person, and it’s not difficult to respect people’s boundaries. It’s enough if we have you in our lives and close to us. More than enough. And we can wait for however long you need to take that relationship to the bedroom. It doesn’t matter, as long as we have you.”

Alucard stares at him. He stares and stares and stares and Trevor wonders if he said something wrong, if he messed up somehow and said something wrong and God, it should have been Sypha who handled that even if she’s asleep, and has she really slept through all of that and how the hell hasn’t she woken up—

“I love you,” Alucard blurts out finally after what feels like several long hours of staring, and his cheeks flush a brilliant scarlet immediately after he says it. 

Trevor arches an eyebrow. “Well, good, otherwise this whole threeway thing wouldn’t work out.”

Alucard rolls his eyes, his cheeks still glowing. “Just come here, Belmont.”

He grins. “All right, since you asked so fucking nicely.”

They’ve only just started kissing when there’s a slight commotion beside them in the form of a finally woken Sypha, who stretches with an absurdly loud sigh as she opens her eyes, blinking up at them with a goofy, half-asleep smile. “Well, _hello_ there, boys,” she calls in a singsong voice. “This is a sight I could get used to waking up to every morning.”

“Really,” Trevor says crossly, “you couldn’t have slept for like five more minutes, could you? You just _had_ to wake up when I finally got the goddamn vampire in my lap.”

“It is one of my many talents,” she says, still grinning. “I wake up when my mind senses that you two are having fun without me.”

“We’d barely gotten started, for your information.”

“By all means, carry on.” She stretches again, smiling happily, the sunlight picking out the strands of russet and gold in her hair and making them shimmer as if dipped in dew. “It’s only fair since we had an audience yesterday.”

“You heard the lady,” Alucard says, smiling down at Trevor from where he’s perched on his lap after Trevor had yanked him there a few seconds ago. His long bare legs brush against Trevor’s feet, his hair falling artfully down his shoulders and turned to platinum in the sunlight. He wonders idly which cosmic entity has smiled down upon him for his life to have come to the point where this ethereally, angelically gorgeous creature is sitting in his lap and smiling at him like he is everything precious in the world and asking for another kiss while the fiercest, most stunning and most _perfect_ woman he’s ever met is in bed beside them watching. God, he is so, so lucky. 

He gives up thinking when Alucard kisses him after that, and it’s soft and careful and blissful and closemouthed, and all Trevor is aware of is the press of his lips and the brush of his nose against Trevor’s and how close he is. He hooks an arm around Alucard’s neck and pulls him in closer, feeling Alucard’s palms curl on his bare chest. It feels good to kiss Alucard in the sunlight among the rumpled bedcovers, both their hair in disarray with a sleepy Sypha sprawled on the mattress beside them. It feels good to be with them like this, after so long of only dreaming about it. 

It feels good to be home.

*

He still remembers Taka and Sumi.

He still sees them, their ghosts, flitting around the castle, throats slit and dressed only in flimsy nightgowns, blood staining the white fabric. Remembers meeting them, saying to them, _I will not be hunted._ But they had hunted him anyway, setting up an elaborate snare for him that he crept closer and closer to every day he trusted them more and more. And then they set it in front of him; the close of a door, the press of lips, the promise of pleasure—and he had stepped directly into it. 

Trevor and Sypha have taken to sleeping with him now, both of them on either side of him every night. They never touch him, not unless he asks them to, but their presences are enough to make him feel safer. Sometimes he still wakes in the middle of the night, and when he looks around he doesn’t see them but he sees _them_ , Sumi and Taka instead of Sypha and Trevor, winding themselves around him, hands creeping beneath his shirt and between his thighs, mouths and lips seeking. He always wakes a second time with memories fresh in his mind, and no matter how quiet he tries to be one or both of them always wake.

Sypha will take his hand, carefully stroke his hair, whisper soothing words to him till he falls asleep again, her fingers still lingering on his face. Trevor always waits for Alucard to come to him, tucking himself against his body and falling asleep with his head on Trevor’s chest and his arms around him. He knows it’ll take a long time for the memories to become mere memories again, but they will be there every step of the way. 

They clean the castle. 

Fixing broken doors and walls, cleaning the blood off the floor, repairing the broken candelabras and pillars and everything else that was destroyed. It’s a long, arduous task, but as Trevor says to him one day as he sweeps up the broken glass in his father’s study, it’s a favor for a favor—Alucard had taken care of his home, his family’s history. He had done everything he could, so Trevor will do the same. 

He also insists on cooking every day, claiming Alucard has cooked alone for himself long enough. He tries new things, experiments with whatever he can find; doughy swirls that taste of sugar and cinnamon, sweet buttery knots filled with apples and pears, salty rolls that melted in his mouth. They all stay in the kitchen while he works, and there have been more than a few charred loafs of bread after they’d gotten thoroughly distracted, and he would always leave floury handprints on their clothes afterward. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Trevor says one day, leaning against the counter by the oven with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up, flour in his hair. Sypha is perched on the table, Alucard sitting in a chair beside her. It’s evening, waning into night, and outside the window he can see the first stars beginning to emerge in the deep blue sky. 

“Careful, Trevor,” Sypha says with a grin, licking a bit of icing sugar off her wrist, “you don’t do that very often, I’m worried for you.”

He rolls his eyes. “Very funny. But… I mean, we’ve been here for a while now, haven’t we? And out there—there’s a lot of shit left to do. So… you know. Isn’t it time we got out there again? Fix the country up proper?”

“You mean… you want to leave again?” Alucard feels his brows draw together. He can’t imagine being alone again, not now, not when he still sees ~~Sumi and Taka~~ them at the table beside him, untouched glasses of wine in front of them, the blood covering their bodies the same dark red color. They blink into existence even as he watches, blank dead eyes staring at him. They smile, as wide and red and dripping as their slit throats. ~~he will be alone with them again and one day he will go mad and he will join them~~

“No,” Trevor says, his voice shattering the already fracturing shards of reality around him. “No, if we go anywhere, you’re coming with us. This place—it’s not good for you. Staying here will kill you.”

He tries to separate their voices in his head and Trevor’s voice in his ear. “You… want me to come with you?”

“Either we go wherever we go together, or not at all,” Trevor confirms. “You’re coming with us, Alucard. From now on, we’re sticking together. Like that stupid prophecy about the three of us—might as well play into fate’s hands, right?”

“There’s more to that prophecy than just that,” Alucard says, still reeling. “You really want me with you? All the time? From now on?”

“Yeah.” He steps forward, taking Alucard’s face in his hands and giving him a quick, hard kiss. There are probably dustings of flour all over his hair now from Trevor’s hands, but he doesn’t even care. “That okay with you?”

“I—yes. Yes, it’s…” He blinks, at a loss for some reason. It’s a strange thing, to realize exactly how wanted you are by people you love. “But the castle, the Hold. It’ll all be unprotected.”

“I’m sure there’s something in the library, warding spells or something like that. There’s bound to be something in there that’ll protect the place. But until we really clean the country up and erase the curse Dracula’s death put on the land, nothing will really matter anyway, right? What’s the point of protecting all this when the land is tearing itself apart?”

“Maybe once everything is over we can come back,” Sypha says, taking his hand. “Finish rebuilding the Belmont manor, settle for a while. Saving the world is no small feat, isn’t it? But,” she goes on, glancing at Trevor, “I think we should wait a little while before we go. It’s only been a week.”

“We will go,” she says when Trevor opens his mouth. “Just—in a little while, okay?” She raises an eyebrow at him and he caves. “All right, fine.”

“Good.” She stands, making her way over to Trevor and putting her arms around his waist from behind, dropping the tiniest of kisses on his nape. He can’t help but think that they are easier together, more used to each other and more accustomed to each other from all their time together—both in the Hold when he had isolated himself purposefully, and afterward. He supposes it had been his own fault for the former; he hadn’t wanted to get too close to them, not when there were so many more important things at hand. Moreover, they had been on a mission to kill his father. He had felt a constant guilt, one that weighed him down—and yet sometimes he had found himself laughing with them and looking at them and wanting them, and the guilt had only gotten stronger. 

“You look a million miles away,” says Sypha’s voice, and he looks up to see her moving towards him, smiling slightly. The soft amber light from the lamps in the kitchen outline her in bright gold, wreathing her curls and turning them into licks of fire. She is beautiful the way storms and lightning are beautiful—the way people are drawn to them despite their danger and the destruction they can bring. “Where are you, Alucard?”

“I’m right here.” He reaches out to take her proffered hand, pressing a chaste kiss to her knuckles. “I was just… remembering our days on the road and in the Hold. It feels like so long ago.”

“It does.” She twines a lock of his hair around a finger, seeming lost in thought. “I find myself remembering those days rather fondly myself,” she says, happily depositing herself in his lap, her arms wrapping around his shoulders. “I also seem to recall you trying to talk me out of falling for Trevor while sounding rather hopelessly enamored yourself.”

He winces. “Not one of my finest moments, I’ll admit.”

“It was adorable.” She leans forward, her nose brushing against his. “You’re very cute when you’re jealous,” she informs him archly. 

“Good to know.” His fingers find the arches of her hips through her robes, pulling her more firmly into his lap. She grins, her face flushed and her eyes bright, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been more in love in his life. “What was it you said?” she goes on, making a show of pretending to think hard. “Oh yes—emotionally damaged, self-destructive, unreliable…”

“Sypha,” he groans. “Don’t.”

“Harsh, Țepeș,” Trevor says, pointing a finger at him from where he’s peering into the oven. “Very harsh. I’m wounded.”

“Though I suppose,” Alucard murmurs, looking up at Sypha, “it evens out a bit, since I did overhear your conversation about me one night.” Her brows draw together and he raises an eyebrow. “I do seem to recall something about my sadness being like an icy well, and quite a bit about me being a cold spot in the room as well.”

She sighs, her smile fading. “You heard that. Of course you heard that.” She fiddles with his hair, her expression sad. “Alucard—”

“I know what you meant,” he says. “And you were right.”

She shakes her head. “It still didn’t give me the right to say that.”

“I distanced myself purposefully,” he says. “I suppose I was a bit remote, and more than a little cold. You tried to talk, tried to help, but I shut you out every time.” He laughs a little. “It’s a miracle you both ever fell for me in the first place.”

“Nonsense.” She plants a soft kiss on his cheek. “We saw right through your artifice, Adrian Țepeș. There was nothing you could hide from us that we couldn’t see. And moreover, it was all over for me once we got to the Hold. Dear God, your _laugh_ … it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.” She grins at the blush that rises to his cheeks. “I didn’t stand a chance after that.”

“Same here, but for me it was when you pinned me down after we fought under Greșit, hissing in my face like a demented cat,” Trevor says, in the tone of one recalling a particularly fond memory. “I mean, what’s not to love about a very attractive blond vampire pinning you down and threatening to rip your throat out?”

“It was hot,” Sypha declares. 

Alucard chokes on a breath. “I’m sorry?”

“It was,” she insists. “Two very good-looking men, one shirtless and one fighting with a _whip_ … it isn’t difficult to comprehend. One cannot blame a lady for getting all sorts of thought in her head.”

“Oh? What thoughts were those?” Alucard grins up at her and she quirks a brow, smirking at him. “One day I’ll tell you,” she says, eyes glittering with teasing mirth. “One day when there are a lot less clothes and a lot more of this.” She pecks his lips and he laughs, pulling her closer. “But until then my lips are sealed.” She smiles. 

“Keep your secrets then,” he says, accepting another little kiss. She tastes like cinnamon and butter and tea, and her lips are soft against his. It all seems a little too good to be true, having her here and close. Almost like a dream, idyllic and perfect, something his mind would conjure up on the bleakest days. But if this is a dream, then it’s a good one. 

“There’s something I want to show you after dinner,” he says once she draws back. Her fingers curl around his jaw as she leans in for another kiss. She pulls away just a fraction of an inch, so close he can still feel her lips brush against his when she speaks. “All right,” she whispers. Her breath feathers on his lips, soft and warm, and across the table Sumi’s bloodstained ghost flickers, fading a little. 

Sypha takes his hand and he looks back at her bright eyes, and he wonders how he ever thought Sumi and Taka could ever be what Trevor and Sypha were. Nobody can. 

He brushes the back of his hand across her cheek, wondering when he got so lucky. “I love you,” he says. 

She smiles at him. “I love you, too.”


	8. Nyx

She can tell Trevor wants to leave the castle. 

He’s impatient, restless, constantly at the edge of his seat. She knows he can’t sleep, because whenever Alucard wakes in the middle of the night just as he does every night he is already there, already whispering to him in a soft, soothing voice, hands careful on his back and in his hair. And while Alucard always falls back asleep, head pillowed on Trevor’s chest and fingers tangled around Sypha’s, Trevor never does. He lies awake, eyes reflecting the starlight that spills inside from the windows. 

He never says anything, but she knows he wants to go. Back to where the world needs them, back to the people and the night hordes and Dracula’s curse, its destructive thrall and the blanket of panic it has settled over Wallachia. And she knows he wants to take Alucard away from this place, and everything it has come to mean to him. She sees it every time Alucard blanks out as he does sometimes, eyes glassy and unseeing, memories lashing around his conscious as tightly as the silver wires had. It takes one or both of them calling his name to bring him back, and whenever he does he jumps and looks around as if waking from a bad dream, eyes wide and cornered. 

She knows he cannot stay here. 

It’s killing him, even if they’re there to stay the panic and the scars—literal and metaphorical—that everything has left in its wake. He insists he’s fine, but she knows he isn’t. How can he be? 

“I want them to stop,” he whispers to her one night after the nightmares force his eyes open, the same way he’s woken since the day they came back. She wonders how much sleep he had gotten before that, wonders if he’d even been sleeping at all. He looks small and crumpled almost, curled up beside her into a ball on the rumpled sheets with his hair in disarray, cheeks flushed and eyes red-rimmed, both with exhaustion and emotion. “I can’t keep seeing them like this, Sypha, I’ll go mad.”

She slips her arms around him, pressing him against her, and he melts against her, fingers clenching in the fabric at her back. “Once you let them go, once you make peace with them and yourself for what happened, they will go away on their own,” she murmurs, and he sighs, his breath fanning over her throat. “I don’t know how long that’ll take.”

“It’ll take as long as you need.” She tucks him against her, placing a kiss on his golden head. “And we will be there every single day.”

“Then I will rest easier.” He lifts his face, pressing a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth before nestling closer and closing his eyes, his arms still tight around her, a warm and steady cage. He falls back asleep quickly enough, lashes fluttering against her collarbone as he dreams. 

Sometimes they stray closer and closer to the invisible line that all three of them have drawn, the line they know has to be crossed deliberately or not at all. She knows they’re nearing it, the thought lingering in the back of her mind every time they tangle together in Alucard’s bed, his lips hot on hers and his hands clenching on her thighs beneath her robes, his voice roughened and thick with desire in her ears. And every time they do she thinks, _tonight might be the night, we can finally cross that line, have each other in all our entirety—_ and then Alucard stills, goes rigid almost, his breath catching violently in his throat as he pulls away. And then her heart settles back from its nervous gallop to its usual steadiness, and the moment passes, and the line vanishes back into the distance, far away and uncrossable once more. 

She knows it’s selfish to feel disappointed whenever it does, but she can’t help it. She knows he needs time, and space, and comfort. The bodies outside may be long since dead and buried, but the scars they’ve left behind go far deeper than just skin. And those scars will take much, much longer to heal. 

“Can you drink blood?” Trevor asks one night, turning and propping himself up onto his elbow so as to look at Alucard between them. “I mean, you’ve got fangs and everything, it makes sense.”

“I… can, technically,” Alucard says with a shrug. “But it isn’t necessary unless I’m gravely injured or if I’ve lost a lot of blood. My heart doesn’t produce as much as a human’s does, the process is slowed by my vampire side. If I lose too much, the only way I can regain my full strength is to ingest it. Preferably from a living human being.”

“Have you ever…” Trevor gestures at his own throat, miming two fangs piercing the vein there. “You know.”

Alucard glances up at him, then says carefully, “Once or twice. They were quite willing, and a vampire’s bite if done with care and without the aim to maim or kill needn’t be painful.”

“I’ve heard my fair share about vampire bites being an almost euphoric experience,” Sypha pipes up from Alucard’s other side. “Unless your body is drained afterward.”

Alucard glances between them, his gaze almost suspicious. “What are you two getting at?”

Trevor points to the scars winding themselves around Alucard’s body. “In theory, if you drank fresh, living human blood, will those scars go away?” he asks bluntly. 

Alucard freezes, and she can physically see him contemplating the possibility, the chance, no matter how inconsequential, of finally erasing the marks of betrayal from his skin. She can see how much he hates them, sees it in the way he traces them sometimes with disgust and hatred and anger clear in his eyes, in the way his hands automatically flutter upward like pale butterflies whenever either Trevor or Sypha divest him of his clothes to cover them, shame apparent in the downward cast of his eyes and the blush that rises hot in his cheeks. 

“I… I think so,” he says finally. “But I can’t—I won’t—drink either of your—I mean, unless you’re offering—but I couldn’t possibly…”

“Shut up,” Trevor advises him, and Alucard promptly shuts his mouth with a snap. “We’re plenty willing. At least I am. Sypha can’t—”

“And why can’t I?” She glares at him. “I’m more than willing too! And I want to help.”

“You’re smaller than me, you’ve got less blood in you.”

“What does it matter, my heart beats same as yours, I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Both of you, shush,” Alucard says firmly, sitting up between them. They fall silent as he stares into middle distance contemplatively, his lower lip caught on his teeth. The gesture allows the long curve of one of his fangs to catch the moonlight spilling into the room through the arching windows, and for a second it transfixes her, the deadly arc of it tapering to a point so sharp it can cut through skin and tear through bone. 

Finally he takes a deep breath, closing his eyes. “I want these gone,” he says, rubbing the scar that twines around his wrist with a finger. “But I don’t know if it’ll work or not if I use blood to try and heal them.”

“Worth a shot, isn’t it?” asks Trevor equably. “If it doesn’t work, at least you’ll get a nice healthy dose of blood from willing donors. If it does work, all the better.”

“I suppose,” is all Alucard says in reply. 

“That settles it.” Trevor sits up beside Alucard, peering into his face. “Wrist? Neck? I swear if you end up having a kink where you prefer the femoral I’ll have to put my foot down—” 

Alucard laughs a little. “No, I don’t. Neck is fine.”

“Thank God.” He grasps the collar of his shirt with both hands and pulls it off over his head, dropping it at the side of the bed once he’s discarded it. Alucard’s eyes flick over his bare chest appreciatively in an almost involuntary reaction, which Sypha can empathize with emphatically; if it’s right there, one can’t help but look. “I was worried about that.”

“You seem to have given this an awful lot of thought,” Alucard says once he tears his eyes away from Trevor’s chest to focus on his face. He raises an eyebrow and Trevor shrugs matter-of-factly. “When your boyfriend has fangs and there’s a more than slight possibility that a time may come when he’ll stick said fangs into you, the question of exactly where tends to cross your mind pretty often.”

Alucard snorts as he takes hold of Trevor’s shoulders and pushes him down so that his back hits the bed, leaning over him and brushing his hair away from his eyes. “So that’s what you’re thinking about when I catch you staring at my fangs sometimes. I should have known.”

“I can hardly be blamed,” Trevor says, grinning up at Alucard, who makes a face at him as he maneuvers himself into position above Trevor with a knee on either side of his hips. “The infamous vampire hunting Belmont daydreams about getting bitten by his vampire lover,” he says with apparent relish, smiling just widely enough for his fangs to glint cruelly in the light. He tsks disapprovingly, a finger trailing down his face and coming to rest at the pulsing vein in his muscled throat. “Your forebears will be rolling in their graves.”

“You’re not a proper vampire,” Trevor says, probably attempting to sound lofty. But his eyes are unfocused and they keep straying to Alucard’s lips, over which his fangs protrude slightly, and it comes out fairly distracted and not-entirely genuine. Alucard rolls his eyes. “Same difference. What would dear old daddy say?”

“In response to this very compromising situation, in which there is a very _very_ good looking man above me looking at me like he wants to eat me?” He grins, a hand reaching up to slide into Alucard’s hair and pulling him down. “Probably something along the lines of ‘good for you, son’, or maybe even ‘I wish that were me.’ Hell, I’m wishing I were me, and I _am_ me.”

Alucard’s laugh is muffled by Trevor’s lips as he pulls him down the rest of the way, his pale hair sliding down his shoulders and curtaining their faces. They separate a few seconds later, and Alucard is laughing in earnest now, face flushed and lips swollen and—happy. He looks truly happy, as if right now there’s no place in the world he would rather be than right here. It makes a swell of hope rise in Sypha’s chest suddenly, something bright and warm unfurling inside her like some great flower taking root and growing slowly but steadily. “You’re an idiot, Trevor,” he says fondly, a finger tracing the outline of Trevor’s lips tenderly. 

“Thanks, I know. Now bite.” He tilts his head expectantly, and Alucard’s eyes flick to Sypha. They exchange brief but meaningful glances—she knows she has to stop him if he goes too far, if he loses control, and he knows he trusts her to do so. A moment and a deep breath later, Alucard leans down and bites. 

She sees Trevor’s fingers on Alucard’s shoulders tighten their grip just a fraction when Alucard’s fangs pierce his skin, but a few moments later they slowly relax, his white knuckles growing less and less taut with every second that passes. She sees his eyes flutter shut, and bit by bit he seems to be getting less and less tense. Alucard’s hair is once again curtaining his face, but as a contrast to Trevor’s relaxing hands his are clenching on Trevor tighter and tighter with every presumable swallow of blood. 

About ten seconds into the whole affair the scars begin to fade.

It’s unnoticeable at first, but the harder she looks the more obvious it starts to become—they’re fading, turning from livid and dark to a paler pink within a fraction of a second. She stares, stunned and disbelieving, as they seem to sink into his skin like ice into water, shrinking and paling before her very eyes. The lashes around his chest and arms have faded almost entirely, but the scars that wrap his hips and legs are still somewhat dark, the fresh blood and the healing power that comes with it not reaching that part of his body yet. 

She knows he needs at least another minute, but Trevor definitely won’t last that long—his eyes are fully closed and he’s almost entirely limp now, his lips parted slightly and his hands on Alucard’s shoulders slack. 

She reaches out and places a gentle hand on Alucard’s shoulder. “Alucard, that’s enough.”

He withdraws immediately, sitting up smoothly without missing a beat. There’s no blood on his face or lips, but the two neat little puncture marks on the side of Trevor’s throat are still leaking droplets of it, the moonlight silvering their iridescent surfaces and making the blood look almost black. Alucard leans down carefully as Trevor’s eyes flutter open, carefully sealing the wound with his tongue in an openmouthed kiss to his neck. Trevor gives a little involuntary shudder at the contact, blinking woozily up at them. 

“I didn’t take too much, did I?” Alucard asks, peering worriedly at him, and he waves the question off, though the gesture lacks his usual grace. “Nah, ’m fine,” he says. “Did they fade?”

“Mostly,” Alucard says, looking down at himself, a carefully neutral expression on his face. “I’ll need a bit more to finish the process.”

“Well, lucky for you,” Sypha says sweetly, tugging at his sleeve, “there’s two of us.”

He balks visibly. “Sypha, I don’t want—”

She shakes her head, having none of it. “If either one of you even tries to use the ‘I’m a man and you’re a woman’ argument, I will burn off your eyebrows.”

He closes his mouth.

“Good boy. Now get over here, you’ve deboned Treffy like a fish and he isn’t very likely to move anywhere anytime soon.”

“Mean.” Trevor pouts, turning over on his side to blink hazy eyes at them as Alucard moves over to Sypha. She glances at him, raising her eyebrows. “So how does it feel?”

“Desecrating my family’s age-old values?” he asks cheerfully. “Satisfying as hell.”

“Not that, idiot. The whole biting thing.” 

“Oh, that. Well, you’ll find out in a minute or two. But I’ll tell you one thing: remember when I said once that beer was better than sex? I was dead wrong, Sypha. Dead wrong.” He sighs, flopping onto his back again on the covers with a contented sigh and ignoring Sypha’s indignant look in his direction as he does. 

“He told you beer was better than sex?” Alucard murmurs, easing her too onto the mattress onto her back and positioning himself above her. He’s smiling a little, that soft private little smile she’s noticed he saves just for her, and the smile she can never help returning. “To my face,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Well, maybe not directly to my face, but very much aware that I was within earshot. Right behind him, in fact.”

“Well, I’m sure he paid very dearly for it,” Alucard says, and she laughs. “Oh, he did.”

Trevor grumbles unintelligibly, muttering something about tyrannical girlfriends. Sypha hides her smirk as she says, “Well, I can’t speak for him, but I’m sure he enjoyed it.”

Alucard’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into his hairline, but he seems to stow his questions away for later as he leans down, his eyes glittering a dark intriguing amber. Her lower lip catches on her teeth and her eyes fall shut halfway as his lips brush against the pulse in her throat, slow and languorous almost, as if he wants to make this as pleasurable for her as it may be for him. His long lashes flutter against her skin as she feels his lips part, feels the barest scrape, a hint of sharp fang against her throat—and then with no warning he tilts his head and bites down, his fangs piercing her skin, which yields as easily as if it were made of paper. 

She feels it is as if two needles have pierced her throat, and hears herself hiss almost against her will; but the discomfort vanishes almost as suddenly as it had come, and her breath cuts off into a low exhale as she feels something spreading from the spot where his fangs touch her, something heady and lulling and something that fills her with something almost like euphoria, lightening her body. 

She closes her eyes as it ripples up her body from her toes upward, slow waves of intense feeling that crest over her muscles beneath her skin and leaves a sort of lightness in their wake. It suffuses her whole body until she feels like she’s floating, floating somewhere high above the clouds where the stars strewn across the crushed black velvet of the night sky glow like polychromatic gems, like pinpricks of diamond. It’s not quite pleasure and not quite anything she’s ever felt before—it’s intoxicating, and she realizes rather giddily that she doesn’t want it to stop, that she would allow Alucard to drink her blood forever and be content—

He draws away just as she thinks it, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, not from loss of blood but the loss of whatever had flooded into her veins at the touch of Alucard’s fangs. She wants nothing more than to simply lie there, but her body moves of its own accord anyway, hauling herself up onto her elbows. “Oh, you were right Trevor, that _was_ better than sex—” she starts, then stops short. She blinks out at Alucard dazedly, and once her eyes come into focus she sits up straighter, eyes widening as she allows her gaze to travel up and down his body. 

The scars are gone.

Where they had been, wrapping cruelly around his body as grotesque reminders of what had happened to him, now there is only skin, smooth and moon-white, flawless and near-perfect. She can still see the rough scar bisecting his chest from shoulder to hip, the scar his father had given him, peeking out through the collar of his shirt, pale pink against his skin—it seems that Dracula remains the only person powerful enough to truly scar him, to leave a permanent mark on his body—but the lashes from the wire Taka and Sumi had used to bind him have vanished entirely. 

He’s gazing down at himself, his face entirely blank. She can see Trevor on his other side, his eyes also clinging to the places they had once been. 

Nobody speaks.

Finally after what feels like years but is probably only mere minutes, Alucard says, “Thank you—both of you—I could not have…” He takes a shaky breath, shutting his eyes. “I do not know how much longer I could have gone on with those scars as reminders of what took place.”

“We know.” Trevor puts a brief hand on his shoulder, and makes to remove it when Alucard reaches up, stopping him. Their fingers interlock tightly, Trevor’s broad and scarred and tanned, Alucard’s slender and pale and unmarked. His other hand reaches out to take Sypha’s, smaller and freckled and skinnier than his own. They sit like that a moment, hand in hand, linked by so much more than physicality. There could not possibly be three more vastly different people in the word than Trevor and Alucard and Sypha, but perhaps that is what makes their being together like this all the more beautiful, as if even the proper way of the world folds and unfolds, the universe shifting and realigning just so that their lives can touch. 

“I was a fool,” Alucard says softly, after minutes of sitting in silence, “to think that they could be what you are to me. I thought… in my loneliness I thought I might forget you in time. But I could not. I could never…”

“Just as we knew no one but you could fill the empty spaces of your absence,” Sypha says, leaning forward to brush his hair out of his eyes. “And now there will be no more leaving anyone behind.”

His eyes find hers, impossibly bright in the darkness. “You promise?”

They’re such simple, almost childlike words, but behind them is tethered a great weight, something rooted deep into everything that has hurt this boy, everything that has been torn from him and cast into some great void, one born from all the grief and anger and sadness that has veiled him since he woke from that coffin so many months ago. They are words that mean so much more than they say, and words she knows mean an infinity of hope and belonging. 

She places the gentlest of kisses on his lips, carefully closemouthed so as not to taste her own blood on his tongue. She draws away and his eyes are closed, an incandescently grateful expression behind his face. 

“We promise,” she says.

*

It’s strange, not to see the scars anymore.

He no longer looks away from himself with a jerk and a grit of his teeth, no longer has to squeeze his eyes shut against the memories that threaten to arise and choke him. Their metaphorical marks are still there, but the absence of their physicality is startling in its relief; he had never guessed that not seeing them anymore could ease the burden this much. 

But it does, and he is desperately grateful for it. Sometimes it’s jarring—he can’t say he’d gotten used to them, but their sudden absence is often surprising. He’s certainly a shade more comfortable with physical contact now, since the overwhelming instinct to cover the marks is gone now, and he’s relieved whenever he finds himself relaxing, finds himself seeking contact instead of shying away from it. 

Trevor and Sypha appear to have picked up on it, clearly having noticed that he’s no longer as uncomfortable being touched as he had been before—more often than not they all fall asleep tangled together, and whenever he wakes up Sypha’s head is pillowed on his chest and he can feel the smooth hardness of Trevor’s chest curving against his back; Sypha takes his hand even when they’re merely sitting beside each other, tracing his palm and fingers as if committing the feeling of his skin against hers to memory and Trevor kisses him so often his lips may very well taste of honey, little absentminded pecks on the mouth whenever either of them enter or leave a room, or sits down for dinner, or wakes up in the morning. 

It’s a sweet sort of reality, and while the ghosts aren’t entirely ghosts just yet he knows there’s time. One day they will have to leave the castle, and he knows that leaving behind the shell of the place that has come to represent so much more than just the place he’d grown up in will be calamitous for the bad memories, that they will either entirely fade, or at least very close to it. He just isn’t quite ready to face the world yet.

It rains sometimes, the occasional summer shower that comes and goes in brief spurts, and whenever it does they gather in the study and shut the windows and build up the fire, sit entwined in front of the fireplace and share in each other’s warmth. It’s a steady thing, what they have between them. Steadier than he thought he was capable of being a part of. 

“I’ve heard rumors,” Trevor says one day as they sit by the fire after a sudden and vicious storm has chased them to take refuge before its warmth, “about a vampire stronghold in the east, planning on annexing themselves an empire.”

“Rumors from where?” Sypha asks drowsily, lifting her head from Alucard’s shoulder where she’d been dozing a bit.

“Night creatures. Some of them talk,” he says. “Just before I killed one, a few days before we went to—you know—and I heard it say something about a vampire queen and an unstoppable demon army, but I thought it was just bullshit. Then again, a couple of days before we reached here I heard another one say something similar. What do you think?”

“It’s possible,” Alucard says after a while. “There are plenty of vampire generals around the world, though the majority of them were summoned by my father to be a part of his War Council. How far east did they say?”

“They didn’t.” Trevor leans back on his hands, the firelight dancing over his skin in a shifting landscape of light and shadow. He’s staring into the flames, whose reflection writhes in the blue of his eyes and makes them shine an almost eerie green. “But it bothered me. Remember Braila? We never even went there. God knows what’s happened, maybe we can find out a little about it if we go…”

“No, he’s right. We should,” Alucard says when Sypha opens her mouth in apparent protest. “We’ve dawdled here long enough. Wallachia is in chaos; we need to go out and help.”

Sypha is frowning; it’s clear she disapproves. “I would hardly call staying here to help you after something as cataclysmic as what happened, something that nearly destroyed you, as dawdling,” she says. “And we did not have the energy to go to Braila, Trevor, not after—” She stops short, catching herself with an almost physical jerk. “After what happened,” she says instead, her voice carefully controlled. 

Alucard turns to them. “What happened?” he asks. “What did you see out there that made you return here with no hope?”

“Alucard…”

“I think it’s time we told him, Sypha,” Trevor says with a sigh. “We owe him that much—and how will you be able to get over it if you never even talk about it?”

“You listened to what I had to say,” says Alucard, taking her hands and placing a gentle kiss on her knuckles. “Now allow me to help you in return. I promise I will do whatever is in my power to ease the burden it’s placed on your shoulders—both of you.”

She sighs, shutting her eyes a moment, then opening them again. She gazes into the flames, her expression bleak and distant, and steeling herself as if about to do something very, very difficult, she begins to speak.

“We were on the road, and after killing a few night creatures and tying one to the back of the wagon to gain favor we came upon a little minster town we learned was called Lindenfeld…”

**~FIN~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thought this was as good a place to end this story as any. thanks so much to everyone who commented and hit the kudos button, your encouragement and kind words meant the world to me.


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